The Spectator Lecture

On these occasions, there is nothing wrong with a little bit of vulgarity. Perhaps I can bother you with some statistics:

191 hours and 43 minutes on the floor of the House;
2025 amendments;
around a million words.

The proceedings are just the thing to give Aunt Agatha for Christmas.

The Scotland Act

Much remains to be put in place before the Parliament meets on 6 May next year. But we are on the home run. It is a good moment to absorb - and savour - the fact: we will have a Scottish Parliament again.

And it is a necessary fact.

When we came to power, keeping the status quo was not an option. We had our manifesto commitment to meet, but this reflected something more fundamental.

It was the settled will of the Scottish people that there should be a change to the existing arrangements. They had voted consistently and in dominant numbers over more than two decades for parties committed to change. All the evidence supported the one conclusion: no change would have short-changed the Scottish people.

We took care to test the firmness of that will. Our judgement was vindicated. Our proposals were overwhelmingly backed in the referendum held in September last year.

This is by way of pre-amble. But it is worth reminding ourselves as we debate the implications of change that no change had implications too.

Could we really have gone on denying the clear wish of the Scottish people for greater responsibility for their own affairs? Could we really have perpetuated a settlement with which the Scots were patently ill-at ease?

Not to have conceded the right to more self-government in Scotland would have been an abrogation of democratic responsibility.

Change and despondency

But the fact of change has been greeted by some in Scotland, but more particularly in England, with despondency.

This goes beyond concern about the details of the settlement as enshrined in the Scotland Bill. It is despondency at the passing of the old order. Does devolution mean, we are asked, the end of the UK as we know it?

Perhaps as we knew it. But it is certainly not the end of the UK. I want to use tonight’s lecture to show why despondency is misplaced, why devolution will not end, but strengthen, the UK.

Let’s first examine the despondency. I hesitate to call it a thesis, but there is a line of thought which pops up now and again, not infrequently in the Spectator itself, occasionally in other journals.

It has a tinge of late night melancholia. It goes something like this.

The Scots are parochial and anti-English.

Devolution is parochialism writ large and driven by anti-English sentiment.

Deep in this slough of despondent thought, the authors come to a doleful conclusion. The Scots will jump from the UK before they are pushed. Or an even more doleful conclusion - the push should come before the jump.

Through the ages there has always been a Scot prepared to take a gloomy view of Scotland. I am conscious that every speech should be decorated with quotations from great philosophers. I therefore offer P G Wodehouse’s thought that ‘it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine’.

The response to despondency

These people have to be answered, because of who they are and where they write. Andrew Neill in the Spectator, John Lloyd in the New Statesman, Michael Gove in the Times. All tell the same sad story. To quote Andrew Neill:

‘Those of us who are proud to be Scottish and British have become strangers in our own land.’

He complains that:

‘The foul-mouthed, anti-English rant of an Edinburgh heroin crackhead in Trainspotting has been made into Scotland’s Gettysburg Address by fashionable bletherers.’

No case ever knowingly understated.

But I recognise that there is unease. And that concerns me because it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If it becomes received wisdom in England that the Scots have given up on the English, that will encourage the English to give up on the Scots. We will drift towards a mind set which will suit nobody but those who actually hanker after separation.

It concerns me because it misrepresents what devolution is about.

We have created a logical and a stable division of political power. To proclaim this as the end of the UK is to write off the future with scant regard for the reality of devolution. It is to lose that sense of tolerance which makes our political system work.

It is wrong because it takes a highly selective view of the Scots and of Scotland

Scotland is not parochial

Of course there is parochialism in Scotland. In odd corners of every nation there are those for whom the next street is a foreign country. Of course there is anti-English sentiment. That undoubtedly has its ugly side. There have been unpleasant incidents.

But an incident is not a trend. The unacceptable prejudices of a minority do not reflect the opinions of the vast majority.

There are Scottish football followers who enthusiastically support whatever team is playing against England. But let’s keep a sense of proportion. You do not judge a nation by the actions of its more excitable football fans.

I remember sitting in a bar in Blackpool watching Manchester United playing Bayern Munich in the first round of the European Cup – a happy escape from the Labour Party Conference. Around me were English football fans cheering on the Germans. The explanation? They were Arsenal supporters.

The idea that Scotland as a whole is parochial, that devolution is somehow driven by parochialism, simply does not wash. It does not stand up on any understanding of Scotland’s past or Scotland’s present.

Scotland: an open economy

Scotland is a small place on the edge of the European continent. It has never been a credible strategy for the Scots to turn inwards, to ignore the wider world. That was never going to be the route to prosperity, to a vigorous cultural live, to a vigorous society.

Take the economy. Scotland is a trading nation. That has been the case for long enough. What brought the Dutch influence to the towns of the East Neuk of Fife? Trade. What supplied the cotton mills of Lanarkshire and absorbed their product? Trade. What were the ships on the Clyde built for? Not to sail up the canal to Edinburgh, but for trade.

We have not lost this trading outlook. In manufactured goods alone, Scottish exports exceeded £20 billion last year. And this excludes the exports to our largest single market - the rest of the UK.

This international perspective is reflected in other ways. Scotland has been a favoured destination for inward investment for many years.

Inward investors come because of the supply of skilled labour, the scientific and engineering base, the quality of life, access to UK and European markets, because Scotland is a good place to do business.

Inward investors have brought jobs and prosperity to Scotland. The Scottish economy has absorbed the benefits of this international exposure, the technological developments, the introduction of new products and processes, the alternative management practices.

Scotland is an open economy. We are export oriented. We are open to new ideas and best practice from across the globe. We play our part in the global economy.

Cultural identity

What about cultural identity? Two vignettes. Look back to the Scottish Enlightenment of the late 18^th Century. The coming together of talents can be seen on the walls of Edinburgh University’s courtroom. Clearly the University Authorities wanted an equivalent of a team photograph. They sent for the local man to paint portraits of the luminaries of the day.

The result is magnificent: in a room by Robert Adam hang portraits by Sir Henry Raeburn - William Robertson, the historian; Adam Ferguson, the philosopher, who pioneered sociology (some would argue it was a great mistake); Playfair; and Carstares. To these can be added Hume, Scott and Adam Smith.

Look today to the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe. Together they are a tremendous Scottish success story. Both draw much of their strength from Scottish support and their vitality from Scottish performers and the Scottish cultural repertoire. But both reach out to an international culture and international audiences - and both succeed.

Scots: outward-looking

To think of Scottish people as inward looking is equally misplaced.

Europe is scattered with the bones of Scottish soldiers and merchants who found an outlet for their energies in foreign lands.

Not all examples are Marshals of France, great captains of industry or merchant princes. Can I now drag in my current favourite fact?

I have recently come across Hugh Thomas’ excellent book on the history of the slave trade. One of his notable characters is a Scot from Glasgow, Richard Oswald, who conducted his trade in slaves from Bence Island off Sierra Leone. The island was fortified with guns, protected by a square enclosure and, most unlikely of all, ‘a good understanding with the natives’.

In 1760, for the entertainment of waiting captains enjoying shore leave, he built a golf course on the island served by African caddies dressed in kilts especially woven in Glasgow. There’s imagination for you.

Seriously, however, Scotland provided far more than its fair share of explorers, missionaries, administrators and entrepreneurs who pushed out the bounds of the British Empire.

The Scottish Diaspora is huge. Many had little choice but to leave. Others followed the scent of opportunity. It accounts, I suppose, for the composition of the current Cabinet.

Scotland is not a place turned in on itself. You see it in the assimilation in Scotland of migrants - Jews, Poles, Italians, Asians - not, to be sure, without tension and some unpleasant incident, but certainly without the bitterness which has marred the intermingling of other peoples.

Devolution does not mean a parochial Scotland. It does not mean a return to the kailyard. Inwardness is not the Scottish experience of the past. It is not the Scotland that I know. It will not be the future.

Devolution and Scotland’s relationships with the rest of the UK

Scotland has always had this international perspective. But the great periods: the Enlightenment of the late 18^th Century, the great entrepreneurial explosion of late Victorian times, the cultural renaissance of the twentieth century, so important to Scotland’s sense of identity, have all occurred within and benefited from and enriched the United Kingdom. They are arguments not for separation but part of the case for a strong Scotland within a strong United Kingdom. And to recognise that is not to belittle or undermine what is Scottish.

Devolution does not, will not, separate Scotland from the rest of the United Kingdom. There is a common heritage, economic links, shared experiences, challenges and opportunities. I believe that we are stronger together, weaker apart.

The Colley thesis and its extrapolation

To convince you of that I need to challenge a view of the UK which has now gained a certain fashionable following. That is the view that the UK is held together solely by external factors, that there is no internal cohesion. It is a view which owes a good deal to the influential thesis set out by Linda Colley in Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837.

In brief, Colley argues that Britain was forged in response to contact, and frequently conflict, with the external world. This is essentially a history of a Union driven by negatives: for the Scots a fear of exclusion from English trade and the need to make common cause in an aggressive external trade and colonial policy; and for the English a means of shutting the back door against France and securing the Protestant succession;

This thesis is persuasive as a description of some of the forces which bound Great Britain together in the early 19^th Century. But it is less persuasive when thrown forward from 1837 to 1998.

That extrapolation is fashionable among some who have read her book, and many more who have just heard of it. It runs like this.

The importance of these external forces to the sense of Britishness persisted into the twentieth century, first through the growth of Empire, but then supplemented and ultimately supplanted through the threat posed by an expansive Germany and ultimately the Cold War.

But the Empire was dismantled, the threats were seen off. And Britain, famously, was left looking for a role. The relationship with Europe changed from one of conflict to one of co-operation through the European Community and Union. So, runs the argument, the glue which first held Britain together having weakened, the case for continuing links is fatally wounded.

The counter-argument

Whatever originally forged Britain, we have had close on 300 years of living together as a union. That has engendered a community of interest. If that interest was not apparent in 1707, it is certainly apparent now. Whatever the old logic to the union, there is a new, robust logic now.

The argument is double layered.

The costs of unravelling the UK

One layer is the simple, hard practical fact that unravelling 300 years of union would be a complex, costly, awkward business. It would not just be a matter of turmoil in the economy. Every aspect of national life - everything that has functioned well at a UK level - would have to be unravelled and reinvented in Scotland, everything from Customs and Excise to the Intervention Board for Agricultural Produce, from the Benefits Agency to the Foreign Office, from National Insurance to the National Debt. And all these extra overheads would have to be carried on a far smaller financial base in Scotland. The cost of government would escalate alarmingly.

That is a real dead-weight on the argument for separation. Those promoting an exit from Britain have to convince us that the uncertain gain would be worth the undoubted costs.

But I do not need to defend the Union on that basis alone. For separation runs against the grain of our community of interests. The simple fact is that there is much in the Union which works to the advantage of all in it.

In my view, and contrary to the extrapolated Colley thesis, there are deep and firm foundations on which the Union is built. As the factors identified by Colley fell away, other - positive - interests took their place.

Shared interests

We have shared interests in the world. Look at security. What conceivable external threat is there which Scotland and England would not face together? Where, in any of the hot spots of the world from Iraq to the Congo, is there an interest which is English or Scottish, but not British?

Look at world trade. Where in the complex jungle of world trade negotiations do the interests of Scottish business part from those of English business? The export focus may vary from sector to sector, but the fundamentals are the same - the common interest in an open world trading system.

Think about the bodies through which British interests are projected into the international arena. Is there really a crying need for a separate Scottish seat in the United Nations, a separate delegation to the World Trade Organisation?

Those who advocate the break-up of Britain also want Scotland to leave NATO. Is there a country in NATO which wants to get out? No. In fact, there is a queue to get in. Whatever your defence policy, nuclear or not, NATO guarantees collective security and withdrawal inevitably represents a form of isolation

The argument is about fracturing the ability of these small islands to exert their influence on the world with cohesion, with confidence and with power.

Scotland and Europe

It is sometimes claimed that the Scots are more pro-European than the English. Perhaps the Scots are more comfortable with the idea of closer European ties having preserved their identity successfully through union with a bigger neighbour.

Perhaps it was something which reflected a Scottish antipathy to a virulent Euro-scepticism which claimed, but was not, and must not be, representative of the UK.

Either way, English and Scots share together an interest in seeing an EU which works to preserve peace and build prosperity for all in Europe. And they share a need for the strongest possible articulation of that interest, through a single and united UK voice.

Shared economy

What about business and industry? The English and Scottish economies are inextricably linked. Indeed, in some respects they are one economy. Companies build their operations - and create jobs - on that basic assumption.

Exports from Scotland to the rest of the UK were worth more in 1995 than exports to the rest of the world put together. The biggest export market for Scottish food and drink, chemicals, financial services, engineering products is emphatically the rest of the UK. Well over 350,000 jobs in Scotland are related, directly and indirectly, to that trade.

Business naturally thinks of the UK as a single market. That single market has made us all more prosperous. It makes no sense to think of unravelling what we have achieved when the real challenge lies in projecting our joint enterprise into the larger European space.

It makes even less sense on the eve of the launch of the single European currency. How can anyone argue for separate interest rates within the UK in the same breath as a giving a commitment to joining EMU which will see a single interest rate set for half of Europe? What is the point of a separate Scottish pound, if for safety’s sake it has to shadow its English counterpart?

The shared interests of Scots and English go beyond our place in the world and our economic ties. Underpinning both are our shared values.

Shared values

We have grown to democracy together. We have built the welfare state together. We have nurtured and protected the rule of law together. These things might find different institutional expression, for example through the separate Scottish legal system or the different management arrangements for the NHS in Scotland. But the core values are common and reflect an indivisible commitment to tolerance, to a sense of justice, to fairness.

In short, we occupy a shared space. Shared space on these islands. But shared space too in the way we live, in the way we work, in the way we structure our society.

We have our own identities within that shared space. Indeed, the sense of identity is not cut off even at the Scottish or English level, but can be found too at regional and local levels. But, while retaining pride in those identities, the people of these islands live and move within that space as if it were one.

This is the most important point of all. There is a line on the map which defines the border between Scotland and England. But England for the Scots, or Scotland for the English, is not abroad. It is part of the whole, through which there is a constant flow of people, to study, to do business, to visit, to holiday, to marry, to work, to live.

Devolution does not challenge that conjunction of interests. Far from it. Devolution builds on the foundations laid by that conjunction of interests. It is not about unravelling ties. It is about better governance within the space we share. It is about giving Scottish institutions, the Scottish difference, the chance to develop, to contribute to the whole country.

Towards a modern and flexible constitution

It would be absurd to think that the UK is so fragile that any change to the constitutional settlement is bound to result in the fracturing of the whole. It would be even more absurd to believe that the UK can saunter on into the future with precisely the same set of arrangements that have served it in the past.

Though it might have been denied too often in the past couple of decades, those who know their British constitution know that it has always found the ability to adapt when the case for change is pressing. Indeed, that has been its very strength. Through devolution, we release the latent energy which comes with managing - and taking responsibility - for our own domestic affairs.

The Scottish Parliament must be seen as part of a wider democratic renewal in the UK. The agenda is large because it has been too long ignored.

It includes devolution for Wales and Northern Ireland as well as Scotland. It includes incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights and freedom of information. It includes reform of the House of Lords and a new system of voting for the European Parliament elections.

Better governance is about protecting and enhancing the legal and democratic rights of the individual. But it is also about finding the right level for decision-making.

No one would argue that arrangements for emptying the bins should be a matter for Westminster, or foreign policy a matter for local councils. We need to find the right level for decisions on the whole range of issues which lie in between.

There has been a long history of devolution of administrative control of Scottish affairs to Scotland. That started over 100 years ago and has continued steadily since. It is consistent, sensible - and democratically necessary - to follow that with political devolution.

This Government has been prepared to distribute power - power to individuals as well as political power. That is what is required to maintain the democratic credentials of this country. We are overseeing the biggest distribution of power since women got the vote in 1918. We have a radical agenda and we are making it work.

The logic of separatism is outdated. Why separate out our foreign policies when our interests are common? Why separate out our defence policies when are interests are common? Why break up our tax system or the welfare state when they reflect our common commitment to a decent life for all our people? Why break up our economy when it has melded over 300 years into a common whole?

Breaking these things up will not enrich us. It will diminish us in the world and impoverish us, as individuals and as nations.

Implications for England

The Scottish Parliament is the solution to a constitutional anomaly which has been debated long and hard over 30 years and more. It redefines Scotland’s role within a modern United Kingdom. It has naturally stimulated debate in England about how England is governed. Why not? But it is dangerous to jump straight from Scottish solutions to English conclusions.

Just because there is a Parliament in Scotland does not make it inevitable and obvious that there should be a Parliament in England. Just because the Scots have got the degree of self-government they have long been asking for does not mean that the cross of St George need be opposed to the Saltire.

Clearly the debate should not stop when the doors of the Scottish Parliament open. What we have done in Scotland may be a catalyst for further change. But there is a need for proper consideration. What is right for Scotland is not necessarily right for England. Scottish circumstances are different to English circumstances. There is already innovation in recognising the regional diversity here in England: there are ideas to be assessed, options to be explored. There is time to get it right.

Conclusion

In devolution, we have a settlement which builds on the strengths of the UK. It puts what is best managed in Scotland to be managed in Scotland. It leaves what is best done at the UK level at the UK level. It recognises our community of interest. It recognises our rights and responsibilities within that community. By getting the balance right, we strengthen our shared commitment to the UK, we reinforce the union.

Devolution is a tribute to the maturity and flexibility of the Union and its ability to adapt to meet the needs of its constituent parts. The whole country, all of us, can take credit for that. Devolution will work, not because of clever drafting, but because there will be the good will to make it work. The good will is there because we have a shared outlook on the world. And the roots of that run deep.