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Scotland Bill

My Lords, I shall be brief. I spent 17 years in opposition along the corridor, and there are present at least four or five former Ministers in the Government at the time who were always telling me,

whenever I moved an amendment to a Bill, that we cannot bind a future Parliament with laws we pass in this Parliament. That is a basic rule. In fact I was even taught that in constitutional history at Oxford in the 1950s. You cannot bind one Government.

4.15 pm

I have two other points. The first is to say to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester that he is wrong. Only one person at the opening of the Scottish Parliament said that it was reconvening the Parliament of 1707. That, of course, was Mrs Winifred Ewing, who was a member of the SNP. No one else believed it and no one else said it at the time because they knew that it was wrong. This was a new Parliament and was not a reconvening of the old Parliament of Scotland. It was a new and totally separate Parliament from what had been there before.

Secondly, let me just say to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, on the 75% of members of Parliament, that there was a time when we would have got the 75% of Scottish Members down the corridor because they are all SNP, and the SNP at one time, let us remember, was opposed to devolution. The party has been opposed to devolution in its past—and not that long ago either. It refused to be part of the Scottish convention, of which I was a member, as was, I think, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace. We both remember that the SNP refused to be part of that because it was opposed to devolution, as did the Tory party because it was opposed to devolution, too, but that is a different matter. The fact is we cannot bind, so I am giving some support to the amendments that have been tabled. Politically, when I find myself on the same side as the noble Lords, Lord Norton of Louth and Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, I really am in trouble.