David Steel: New type of union needed

ALL OF our recent institutions, including the Scottish and European parliaments, have just grown higgledy-piggledy along with other legislation dealing with the rights of our citizens, such as the European Convention on Human Rights and Freedom of Information.

While I can understand how this happened, we should consider whether constitutional reform should always be done on such an ad hoc basis. It is one of the features of recent debate that constitutional policy is being made to suit political purposes and the political class. I would like to suggest that we need to start from fundamentals.

We should be devolving as much power and responsibility as is possible and sensible to the component parliaments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to bring government as close as possible to the people.

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However, a federal constitution does not necessarily imply uniformity of its component parts. The received wisdom that federal countries need uniform size among the constituent parts, or equal powers among them, is not the case. Nor would it be the case for a federal united kingdom.

Scotland has given many gifts to the world. One constitutional gift in recent years has been to show how the peaceful devolution of power within a centralised state can be carried out in a peaceful and stable way. That said, we are far from completing the job.

The fundamental conclusion of the “Steel Commission”, in 2006 final, was that the Scottish Parliament should raise as much as practical of its own spending. This was a view I held during the Constitutional Convention, which I co-chaired, which I held during my term as Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, and which I still hold now.

The Scottish Parliament is a unique institution in the world. For its procedures and quality of its work it is now one of the strongest democratic institutions anywhere. Rightly, Scotland can be proud. But in respect of powers to raise the revenue it has authority of spending, it is one of the weakest. This now is the biggest question to address for those of us seeking a stable, long term, mature relationship between Holyrood and Westminster within the UK. It’s a question about having the parliament properly answerable to the people of Scotland for the choices that are made, over legislation, and also budgets. For the future I favour what has been described as a “New Union” within the UK – a Holyrood with appropriate powers to raise the majority of its revenue, a permanence of our institutions so that they exist in a union created in a written constitution, not in a tenancy agreement with the Westminster landlord.

We need a clear understanding of why and where powers lie. Federal countries have the benefit of written and codified arrangements. We have written arrangements but they are of varying standards and clarity. They are not in one place, and they invariably are written arrangements to suit the centre. They are not about the constitutional protection of the nations or indeed their peoples and their rights.

Again we do not need to cast too far back in time for examples of where we can see this to have been more satisfactorily achieved. In 1979 the Canadian government under Pierre Trudeau announced its intention to repatriate the Canadian Constitution from the Privy Council in London to the federal institutions in Ottawa. Some provinces saw this as a centralisation of power to the federal centre while others saw it as right and proper that the Canadian constitution should not be policed by a foreign body. Part 1 of that new Canadian constitution contains the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms and further includes an amending formula for when changes in the relationship between the provinces and federal government are necessary.

We can learn, not only from this process of reform but also how a country with a strong parliamentary tradition can nevertheless move towards a more codified relationship between the centre and nations or provinces. Within Canada this could have been used to describe the Quebec-Ottawa relationship, and do I stretch it too far to say this may sum up the relationship between Scotland and England? We are inevitably affected by decisions made there, regardless of the formal constitutional relationship between us.

This is one of the great attractions of a more federal-type relationship within the UK, as it appreciates that you do not need to have identically sized nations but you do need institutions within the UK to exist in their own right. It is often said that it would be a very unbalanced UK if it was more federal in nature. Well, the province of Prince Edward Island has a population of 140,000 and sends just four MPs to the Canadian Federal House of Commons. Ontario has a population of 12.8 million and sends 108. The clarity of the Canadian approach where popular support provides for strong protections for provincial government and identity, perhaps shows us how we could see progress for Scotland.

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I have said that no self-respecting parliament should rely on handouts from another parliament. I would also add that no self-respecting parliament should have to rely upon the goodwill of another parliament for its very existence. The Holyrood parliament is a creature of statute by the Westminster parliament. Its existence should instead, in future be a permanent feature of the New Union’s constitution. It should not be liable to be abolished unless it also agrees, and Westminster should no longer have the capacity to legislate over areas devolved to it.

This is a shift in the constitutional balance within the Union but I believe it is now a necessary one. It means that union is based upon the principles I outlined but also that it exists with what the Germans call “kompetenz kompetenz”, competence over its own competences.

It also remains a puzzle to me that the electoral system and creation of Scottish Parliament boundaries are not within its own competence but that of Westminster. The majority of the revenue that it expends on services for which it is responsible should also be within its competence.

Many of my former constituents would quite comfortably consider themselves a Borderer first and then a Scotsman. And the same incidentally applies for Borderers born south of the Tweed in Northumberland in relation to Englishness. Politicians at their peril dictate identity and culture. People can quite comfortably consider themselves both Scots and British and European, a combination of all. Indeed for the citizen is it empowering to have ownership of their own identity.

A more federal New Union means that this is recognised but is one where we have the real distribution of power, not simply its devolution.

The question remains as to why we should bother to distribute this power. For me improved governance is about better government, for all our people.

Whatever the constitutional future of Scotland the problems we face are the same. As far back as the early 19th century Sir Walter Scott referred to “the history of my native country, the peculiar feature of whose manners and character are daily melting and dissolving into those of her sister and ally”. ‘Twas ever thus, and his monument in Princes Street is the largest to any writer anywhere in the world.

• Lord Steel of Aikwood is a former leader of the Liberal Party, and was the first Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament. This is an edited extract from his David Hume Institute presidential lecture