Gavin Newlands – 2022 Speech on Scotland’s Future
The speech made by Gavin Newlands, the SNP MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire North, in the House of Commons on 14 December 2022.
I start by saying that I envy my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman)—in fact, I am right jealous—because she gets to sum up today’s debate following the speeches from the Government and Labour Front Benches. Holy moly, talk about fantasy stuff. It is quite incredible. They would have been hilarious, were the matter not so serious, getting to the heart of democracy in this precious Union of ours.
I have recently been rereading Ian Hamilton’s books on his mission to liberate the Stone of Destiny, and on his incredible life before and after the event that was to make him a household name across Scotland and, for a time, the Met police’s most wanted person. Ian was many things—an incredible intellect, a top-tier advocate and a political one-off—but what comes through again and again in his writing and character is his unshakeable belief in the people of Scotland. It was not about whether they should choose self-government, although he continually argued that they should, but about his absolute conviction, rooted in his very soul, that no one had the right to stand in the way of their choice if it was arrived at fairly and democratically.
That should be a completely apolitical and unremarked upon state of affairs, and it reflects appallingly on the two major UK parties that they have turned a matter of basic democracy and decency into a constitutional bunfight. Indeed, prior to the 2014 independence referendum, the SNP and the main Unionist parties all agreed the following joint statement:
“Power lies with the Scottish people and we believe it is for the Scottish people to decide how we are governed.”
That is not a new concept. Many, or at least some, Conservative Members may have grown up with a poster of Maggie Thatcher on their bedroom walls. She said, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) recalled, of the Scots:
“As a nation, they have an undoubted right to national self-determination… Should they determine on independence no English party or politician would stand in their way.”
Brendan O’Hara
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech, and I thank him for bringing up my late constituent Ian Hamilton, a wonderful man. He is talking about the change of heart from 2011 to now. Would he care to speculate as to why that change of heart has taken place? What possibly could have occurred in those intervening 10 years to make that change of heart so dramatic?
Gavin Newlands
I appreciate my hon. Friend’s intervention, but I have to say he has got me stumped. I have no clue—no clue whatsoever. I could hazard a guess. It might be because they are feart: the Conservatives are now feart that they would lose the referendum. It is now five polls in a row that show support for Scottish independence.
Mrs Thatcher’ successor, John Major, said of Scotland that
“no nation could be held irrevocably in a Union against its will”.
David Cameron said:
“I felt, as the prime minister of the UK, I had a choice. I could either say to them”—
“them” being Scotland—
“‘well you can’t have your referendum, it is for us to decide whether you should have one.’”
He went on to say:
“So I did what I thought was the right thing, which was to say ‘you voted for a party that wants independence, you should have a referendum that is legal, that is decisive and that is fair.’”
The former Secretary of State for Scotland, the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale said:
“If the people of Scotland ultimately determine they want to have another independence referendum, then there will be one…Could there be another referendum? The answer to that question is yes.”
The UK has had literally hundreds of referendums over decades. Many like to pretend that they still live in the age of Bagehot and Dicey, when this place could legislate to turn the sky pink and theoretically change the laws of physics, but the simple fact is that popular democracy is not a novelty; nor has it unleashed anarchy in the land. We have had referendums in the UK to solve internal disputes in the Labour party—in the days when Harold Wilson knew some things about heading a broad church that should be studied by the current Leader of the Opposition.
We are still picking up the pieces of the last referendum, which many say was designed as a manifesto commitment by a Prime Minister to silence his Back-Bench awkward squad of arch-Brexiteers and hopefully to trade off in a coalition negotiation with the Lib Dems. That entirely self-created time bomb went off, as did that Prime Minister, in the entirely accurate words of Danny Dyer, “with his trotters up” while the rest of us count the cost. We even had a referendum to keep the Lib Dems happy, which—surprisingly for the Lib Dems—did not.
Back in 2017, the current Prime Minister said:
“It seems hard to block a”—
second—
“referendum but we should push the timing until after Brexit so the choice is clearer for people.”
He also described the Union as being “there by consent” and said that it exists democratically and voluntarily. When asked many times in recent weeks, however, he has been signally unable to tell us how that is the case. How can it be democratic or voluntary when Scots continually give the SNP and our partners an electoral mandate to seek an independence referendum, only to have that denied time after time?
Peter Grant
We have heard a lot about mandates recently. Clearly, as my hon. Friend mentioned, in 2021, the pro-independence parties got more than 50% of the vote on the list vote, which is when people vote for a party rather than candidates. Does he recall that the party that told us that voting for it in the list vote was the only way to stop an independence referendum managed to get 23.5% of the vote on that occasion? Does he think that there is a lesson there about respecting mandates that the Conservative party perhaps should be listening to?
Gavin Newlands
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. He will probably recall, as I do, that not just in that election, but in every election, whether it was for the Scottish Parliament, councils or Westminster, every single leaflet that the Scottish Conservatives put out was about saying “no” to indyref2. That was essentially their only policy in every election, whether it was relevant to that election or not, and they have been soundly defeated every time. Given that the Prime Minister could not tell us, perhaps the Minister or indeed the shadow Secretary of State can explain to us how Scotland or Wales can leave this voluntary Union. What is the route map to democracy? How can we get it?
John Lamont
I do not know where the hon. Member has been, but if he had cared to listen to my opening speech, he would have heard that I made clear the mechanism by which there could be a second referendum. We experienced it in 2011 when there was consensus between both Parliaments, civic Scotland and all the political parties. That consensus is not currently here.
Gavin Newlands
To be clear then—the Minister can intervene again if I am wrong—everything else is in place, essentially. If we look at the situation in Scotland, the votes in the last 2021 Parliament are in place, as is the role of civic Scotland. The only bit that is missing is the consensus of this Government and this Parliament. Is that correct? Perhaps he will confirm that that is the case when he sums up. You are vetoing Scotland’s right to democracy.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. I am not vetoing anything and this is not a chat, so can the hon. Gentleman please continue with his speech?
Gavin Newlands
To be clear, Mr Deputy Speaker, you are not vetoing anything, but this Government certainly are.
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
My hon. Friend has exposed what we already knew, which is that the Government will not tell us what the route is because there is no route. In effect, they are vetoing it because we have had our democracy. Before he became the Prime Minister, the current Prime Minister said of the First Minister of Scotland that,
“I want to take her on and win the argument on the union because I passionately believe in it”.
Does my hon. Friend share my view that the Prime Minister has changed his mind on that, because he knows that it is an argument that he cannot win?
Gavin Newlands
Well, if he started the argument, he is doing a pretty good job, given that the independence polls have been so good for Yes. However, it would appear that he has now walked away from that, because he is feart: he is feart of the voice of the people of Scotland. The Minister shakes his head. Perhaps he will now allow an independence referendum, and allow that debate. If he is so sure and the Prime Minister is so sure, let us have that debate—but I see that he is unmoved.
We expect nothing else from Conservative Members, but those in the Labour party—a party that owes its lineage to R.B. Cunninghame Graham and the home-rulers who founded it alongside Keir Hardie—who are still, at least publicly, keen to get the Better Together band back together are setting themselves up for a very graceless fall.
The UK has seen referendums on congestion charging, licensed premises, water authorities, council tax rises, creating directly elected mayors, abolishing directly elected mayors, English regional devolution and neighbourhood plans, as well as a referendum on whether to hold another referendum. Yet we are told that the future of Scotland—the potential self-government of a country that dates back 1,000 years, and the restoration of our relationships with our international friends and allies—is a no-go area. The smallest parish council in England can hold a vote any time it pleases, but a national Government and Parliament elected yet again on a mandate to ask the people what they think are told that now is not the time.
This has not been true of previous referendums and the parties who have called them, but there is no internal dispute in the SNP about independence. It is what we have stood for throughout our 88 years of existence. It is what we have stood for through good times and bad, from the days when saving our deposit in a single constituency was considered a triumph to more recent times. I was there, Mr Deputy Speaker. I may have been young, but I was there. It is the parties who have used referendums to solve their own self-created intramural conflicts who now stand in the way of the democratically expressed will of the Scottish electorate and the will of our democratically elected Parliament.
Alan Brown
Is it not strange that the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), who is vehemently opposed to Scotland having a referendum, was advocating referendums to allow fracking?
Gavin Newlands
I could not agree more. The double standards on the Conservative Benches are unbelievable.
As has been already mentioned a few times by my hon. Friends and me, we have seen the polls shift quite strongly over recent weeks following the Supreme Court ruling, and, more pertinently in my view, the UK Government’s stubborn and shameful refusal to accept the democratic mandate of the Scottish Government. There have been five polls—I wrote “four” in my speech, but now it is five—with a significant lead for Yes, with utterly disastrous polling for the Conservatives in Scotland thrown in for good measure. I say this to the UK Government: change course now, so that when the inevitable happens and Scotland has its say, they have a sporting chance of making it a contest rather than being faced with the prospect of being the side that has nothing other than no to say to a country that wants to say yes.
