Gordon Brown: David Cameron must give Scotland the right to limit impact of Tory welfare cuts

Brown warned that unless changes were made to the Scotland Bill, the Union's future would be left hanging by a thread

Gordon Brown, in his capacity as Special Envoy for Global Education, addressing a press conference at the UN headquarters last week (Corbis)

David Cameron will be guilty of a “double betrayal” that could “blow the Union apart” if the UK Government fails to give Scotland the right to limit the impact of Tory cuts through its own welfare system, Gordon Brown has warned.

In a speech in Glasgow, the former Labour Prime Minister cautioned that unless “urgent” changes were made to the Scotland Bill in the next two weeks, the future of the Union would be left hanging by a thread.

A failure to give ministers at Holyrood the power to top-up people’s welfare benefits – at a time when Scotland found themselves at the “sharp end” of Tory cuts – would combine to make an “explosive cocktail” which could finally bring about the break-up of the UK, Mr Brown said.

The former Labour leader, whose rousing speeches in the run up to last year’s Scottish independence referendum were partly credited with saving the faltering Better Together campaign, also revealed he had written to Mr Cameron to explain how the so-called “Vow” of further powers for Holyrood could still be honoured.

“Without the changes that give the Parliamentary welfare top-up powers to Scotland, we face a perfect storm, an explosive cocktail of measures that could blow the Union apart – the Conservative Government defying the Smith proposals on welfare, the very issue where their controversial imposition of cuts hits Scotland hard,” he told an audience of around 300 people at Glasgow University.

“The Government should avoid what would be seen as a double betrayal – breaking their promises to the poor and breaking their promise to deliver the Smith recommendations in full, on the very powers that are needed to counteract welfare cuts and the austerity they bring.”

Mr Brown said only two changes were needed to the Scotland Bill, which is expected to return to the House of Commons in a fortnight, for the Vow to be honoured: giving Holyrood the right to top-up welfare benefits and an end to any suggestion that the UK Government could prevent it from doing so.

“The two changes go to the heart of what is worrying people in Scotland: what we do about welfare cuts and their impact on austerity,” he said. “[They] must be made in full and not watered down by conditions or caveats, compromised by get-out clauses or negated by vetoes.”

Mr Brown added that the Tories must “come to terms” with the fact that the UK is becoming more “decentralised” and has moved on from the idea that power rests only in London. “With these changes, the old Britain – the Britain of a unitary and centralised state, of unchallenged Westminster power and of an undivided Parliamentary sovereignty – has gone,” he said.