Peter Jones: A new West Lothian conundrum

A referendum in 2014, independence by 2016 – Alex Salmond has presented a smooth, no-fuss timetable for achieving the SNP’s aims. In fact it could cause a major constitutional headache for the rest of Britain, perhaps even a crisis. Nationalists would not worry about that. Why should they? But actually, when you think through all the possible ramifications, there is a potential problem here which could even derail Mr Salmond’s programme.

The cause is the famous West Lothian question, which the SNP say, quite rightly, would be finally answered with independence. This, you will recall, is the problem that while MPs representing Scottish constituencies get a say in deciding English domestic matters such as health and education, MPs in England get no such say over deciding Scottish domestic issues.

But with Scottish independence, there will be no Scottish MPs at Westminster and no more West Lothian question, right? Indeed, that is right, apart from one rather big problem pointed out to me recently by Robert Hazel, professor of politics and director of the constitution unit, University College London.

Had I considered, he asked me, how the UK general election due in 2015 fitted into Mr Salmond’s timetable? No, I confessed, I hadn’t. Well, he said he had, and it appeared that it could throw quite a lot of spanners into the works.

It all depends on whether Mr Salmond wins a vote for independence in October 2014. Let’s assume that he does. What then happens in the general election due in May 2015, thanks to the fixing of UK parliamentary terms at five years?

Scotland would have to participate in this election, because Scotland won’t be independent until 2016, according to Mr Salmond. Since the UK would continue to be running some of Scottish affairs, including the important matter of funding much of the Scottish government’s spending, there would need to be Scottish MPs at Westminster.

Their term, of course, would be a short one, about a year. Then they would clear their parliamentary desks and disappear back to Scotland to look for another job. What would they do during that year? Would they vote on English matters, such as rearranging the English health service should that be a priority of the English government?

Those MPs could, I suppose, impose a self-denying ordinance upon themselves that they would not vote on anything that didn’t affect Scotland. Or they might have one imposed on them by English, Welsh, and Northern Irish MPs. Except that is actually very hard to do, because anything that affects public spending in England affects public spending in Scotland, through the operation of the Barnett formula rules surrounding the financing of Scottish spending.

This might not be a huge problem, because any changes made by Westminster to the way public money is spent in England normally don’t happen until the following financial year, by which time Scotland may well have waved bye-bye.

But then there is a further possible problem. Suppose the post-2015 UK government is dependent for its majority on Scottish MPs. It could happen, if Labour has won with narrow UK majority. It could also occur if there is another Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, in which the Lib Dems have enough Scottish seats.

How then would that government have any authority to do anything in England when its majority was about to disappear in a year’s time? You could argue, I suppose, that it would have its hands full negotiating the independence settlement, so doing anything in England would have to wait. But that’s hardly fair on English voters who could reasonably expect a new government to get on with fixing their problems.

But, hang on a moment. How would this UK government have the authority to negotiate that settlement if it also needed the votes of Scottish MPs to endorse that settlement on behalf of the voters of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland?

It could not, surely, claim to be acting in the interests of all UK citizens, because then English voters would quickly point out that not only do the Scots have a Scottish government negotiating on their own behalf, they also would also have a UK government claiming to be acting in their interests as well. That would be certainly unfair.

This problem might be surmounted by passing a quick law to ban Scots MPs from voting on anything to do with the negotiations. In fact, the UK government would probably have to do that, and declare unequivocally that it was fighting for English taxpayers because, if its majority depended on its Scottish squad, that majority would disappear when Scotland became independent.

Then it would probably face an election in which it would have to defend what it achieved in the negotiations. But, perhaps more seriously for Scotland, this could create an extremely rancorous atmosphere around the separation talks which could make a “fair” settlement hard to achieve.

But that’s not the only problem that Mr Salmond could face. Suppose, having won the referendum, he embarks on talks only to discover the UK government leaks out details of some of the early agreement which are not at all to Scotland’s advantage. Candidates for unionist parties could then stand in Scottish constituencies, pledging either to cancel the talks or to run, under UK government auspices, a second referendum in which the outcome of the talks are put to a popular vote.

Mr Salmond, I suppose, could with some legitimacy refuse to make polling stations and returning officers available for such a plebiscite. That, however, if the popular mood had turned against him, would cause uproar, perhaps even civil disorder.

Dearie me. I think that is enough speculation for the moment. Indeed, you may contend that all this is highly improbable, as history says that the election of a UK government which is dependent for its majority on Scottish MPs is a rare event. But then, recent history says that modern politics is throwing up unexpected results – a majority SNP government, a peacetime UK coalition government – with increasing regularity.

Mr Salmond could, of course, avoid all this. He could bring forward the referendum to the autumn of 2013 and aim to have the first elections for an independent Scottish government on the same day as the next UK general election in 2015. But that would entail bowing to the demands of the UK government, which is unacceptable to him.