BATTLE FOR THE SOUL O
Nationalist MPs are sitting impotent and sullen in the House of Commons. Holyrood is an expensive flop. As the strain on the Union grows, here an esteemed politician considers the dangers – and how we might save the country
IBELIEVE many of those who voted SNP at the 2015 general election – the majority, I would say – want Scotland to remain in the United Kingdom. Yet the SNP leadership, since that election, supposes it has the right to pass legislation relating to Scotland from the opposition benches.
In the summer of 2015, it seemed that every SNP amendment that was defeated should have been interpreted as an affront to Scotland. Pro-Union MPs are accused not only of talking Scotland down but voting the country down, too.
With 54 of their MPs at Westminster, some of the SNP seemed to be suggesting that the voice of Scotland would now be heard at Westminster for the first time. I find this both preposterously untrue and profoundly offensive – it denies the commitment and hard work done to promote and protect Scottish interests by many MPs over the years.
Within months of my election to Parliament, Alec Douglas-Home (MP for Kinross and Western Perthshire) was to move from the post of an authoritative and influential Foreign Secretary into No10 Downing Street. He was to be Foreign Secretary again from 1970 to 1974.
My first Secretary of State for Scotland, Jack Maclay, Viscount Muirshiel (MP for West Renfrewshire), really mattered in the Macmillan Cabinet, as did his successor, Michael Noble, Baron Glenkinglas (MP for Argyll).
Tom Fraser, who was succeeded at Hamilton by Winnie Ewing, was a key ally of Hugh Gaitskell in the Shadow Cabinet, and Peggy Herbison was chairman of the UK Labour Party. Later in the 1960s, Harold Wilson deferred to Willie Ross.
Even more absurd is the idea that the voice of Scotland did not ring out in the Liberal Party or Liberal Democrats. For Heaven’s sake, the party had four Scottish or Scottish-anchored leaders – Jo Grimond, David Steel, Charles Kennedy and Menzies Campbell.
The 54 Nationalist MPs should be true to the promises made by Nicola Sturgeon during the general election campaign. I respect the democratic will of the Scottish people who sent them to Westminster – but they were not sent there to fester with secessionist sentiment or to promote the nationalist agenda of their party. They were sent to represent their constituents in the Parliament of the United Kingdom and to work for the benefit of the entirety of the British people and the strong role of the Scots within that Union.
I fear that the hard core is unappeasable. But so much depends on attitude and a willingness to work together. I was appalled to hear the MP for Linlithgow and East Falkirk, Martyn Day, had concluded his maiden speech in the House of Commons by saying that he would enjoy his term in London ‘behind enemy lines’. Flippant or not, it fosters an impression of hostility.
When I first entered Parliament in the 1960s, the kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland seemed to be impregnable.
WHETHER I like it or not – and, actually, I do not – the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh will exist at least for some years to come, and certainly past the time when I and my contemporaries are all gone. The members, of all political hues – SNP, Green, Labour, Liberal, Tory – will continue to complain that they have insufficient powers and insufficient money from the Treasury in London.
It is fanciful to think that the appetite of Holyrood can ever be assuaged other than by full independence. Yet, despite what many SNP supporters mouth and what the party would have us believe, the SNP leadership must be ever-more apprehensive about the unpopularity which would accrue to them as a result of cuts they would be forced to make in the event of severance from the UK. Bearing this in mind, what would happen if there were another referendum in the foreseeable future? And supposing it becomes clear that, once again, the majority do not support the break-up of Britain, what should become of the Holyrood parliament? Perhaps it would chunter on for some years and then wither away, dying a slow death – a hugely unlikely claim, bordering on the preposterous?
Well, not quite. Of course, MSPs would be outraged at the prospect. Yet the reaction of local elected councillors, who are required to deliver the services about which Holyrood legislates, might not be. Many local councillors, already resentful of the centralising tendencies of Holyrood, are incandescent with anger at what they perceive to be the rapidly increasing costs of the Scottish Government and Holyrood.
A cavalcade of First Ministers, assorted cabinet secretaries, ministers and MSPs do the same job – I think less well, and at vastly more expense – that was done when I was first elected to the House of Commons.
From the perspective of better provision of public services, it has become only too clear that the devolution experiment on this island has failed, not just in Edinburgh, but in Cardiff, too. Look at the soaring expense of Holyrood, the Scottish cabinet ministers, their host of advisers and additional civil servants, members of the Scottish parliament and their researchers, and contrast it with the dire plight of little Argyll and Bute Council. No different from other local authorities, it is at the ends of its tether.
Argyll and Bute is having to turf over public floral displays as part of efforts to save £18million over two years. Flowers have been targeted because of the relatively high cost of maintaining and cultivating the beds, which the council estimates would save £100,000 a year. The Christmas lights are to be axed to save a further £100,000.
Infinitely more important, education will be hit, with 72
additional support assistants sacked to save £1.4million. Other measures include a 50 per cent increase in musical tuition fees, a 20 per cent increase in burial and cremation charges and waste collection reduced to once every three weeks.
SUCH grim necessities are universal among Scottish local authorities but they do not reflect the overall position in England. When it permeates through to the Scottish electorate that financial provision for education, health, policing and social welfare is increasingly unsatisfactory in comparison with south of the Border, the ‘Scottish people’ will start pointing their collective finger at Holyrood and desire to return to robust local government, where democracy and accountability are closer to the people.
I am a citizen of the United Kingdom. I have freedom of worship, speech, association and expression. The Scots have shared a common culture with the English, Irish and Welsh since even before the Act of Union in 1707. In the modern globalised world, the notion that one of the most prosperous and relatively influential states in the world could break down into its constituent nations seems preposterous and unnecessary – even more so, considering the issue was settled by referendum in September 2014.
Yet we are living through an age of the most profound constitutional crisis in the history of these islands.
But I do see some rays of hope, and a vision for the future. It is not a vision which would have us return to the past – the events of the last decades cannot be undone. The SNP is as much a church as it is a conventional political party – and the congregation has, so far, trusted its ministers.
So far, faith has trumped reason. When the congregation discovers that those ministers cannot deliver their promises, as will inevitably be the case, the SNP Government will be vulnerable and probably subject to mighty wrath. Douglas Alexander, who lost in Paisley in 2015, told me: ‘It was like fighting fog.’ Fog has a habit of dispersing.
But the fog did not disperse before the 2016 Scottish parliamentary elections, despite Nicola Sturgeon’s appeal to her party faithful during their 2015 autumn conference in Inverness to ‘judge us on our record’. What is that record?
The truth is that, in the past eight years, in the devolved matters of health, education, the police and fire service, the SNP has presided over a catastrophic decline. The Scottish National Health Service is in crisis. Targets for cancer treatments are woefully unmet. More than 1,000 beds have been closed in Scottish hospitals since 2012.
Expenditure on the NHS in Scotland in 2014 fell by 1.2 per cent. In England, it rose by 4.4 per cent. Education on training midwives and nurses in Scotland has been cut by 1,190 places. And there has been an alarming decline in GP provision.
In education, the SNP Government pledged to limit primary school class sizes to a maximum of 18. In fact, class sizes have risen in every one of the past five years, reaching 25 in some cases.
UNDER the Scottish Government, there has been a real drop in literacy and numeracy standards, as evidenced in the S5 and S6 exam results. Figures from the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy endorse the statistic that Scotland is at a severe disadvantage to England.
And the problem that the universities face is that schools serving deprived areas are simply not producing enough students to enable universities to meet the much trumpeted aspirations of the Scottish Government.
The Government in Edinburgh, while boasting about free tuition fees (made possible by the Barnett formula), has introduced significant cuts in the grants for poor students. And it has made cuts to teacher numbers and education spending which, of course, led to the decline in literacy and numeracy.
The SNP has trumpeted slogans about free tuition fees. In fact, university students have been saddled with greater debt because they have to start repaying their loans for living costs once their incomes reach £16,500, while the figure in England in 2015 is £21,000.
Wickedly – and I have chosen the word carefully – part-time college places have been cut by 130,000. If Scotland is to be a fairer society, this appalling situation must be reversed.
If Scotland is to prosper, we need skilled men and women with precisely the skills that can be acquired through parttime study. There is nothing fair about trumpeting free tuition fees for university students while, at the same time, depriving less academic students of the opportunity to participate in shorter-term courses.
MOST alarming also is the saga of the delayed payments to farmers from the Common Agricultural Policy. The culpability of the Scottish Government was such that it provoked the European Commission to issue a fine of £125million.
The SNP policy regarding the police has been no less catastrophic. Contrary to advice from senior figures in the police and Police Federation, the SNP Government insisted on creating a single Scottish police force. It has been an unmitigated disaster. Local community policing has suffered, with officers being assigned to duties in areas where they have little experience.
I have yet to meet a serving police officer in favour of a national force. We never sought to encounter the sight of armed policemen performing routine duties on the streets of Glasgow. Let us return to regional police forces.
For me, the Union is partly a matter of gut emotion but it is far more than that. The Union is about the pooling and sharing of risk and resources. The Union is about solidarity, especially in adversity. The Union is about standing together on social security. The Union is about having a single economic framework which gives us Scots a domestic market ten times the size of Scotland, with whom to trade, to live and work in.
The Union is about collective defence. As a national serviceman between 1950 and 1952 in the Royal Scots Greys – now the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards – I shared a Centurion tank with two English lads and a lad from Swansea. It is madness to think of unpicking today’s infinitely more sophisticated British Army on the basis of nationality, and oblivious of technical training. How does Scotland have one-tenth of an aircraft carrier?
I am a Man of the Union because the alternative is puerile, romantic folly. I doubt if the SNP non-zealots have any notion as to what the dismantling of the United Kingdom and the disentangling of Scotland from England, not least over tax, actually entails in practical terms.
We need to create ways of making the Union really matter to people, of making it come alive, of showing people how it makes a real difference to their lives, before we lose it all by default. Only if the United Kingdom were to be fractured and we had all gone our separate ways would we come to appreciate what had been lost.