VETERINARY COLLEGE, GLASGOW (GRANT). (Hansard, 4 March 1925)

§ Mr. MAXTON
I wish at the outset to state that T want to speak for a very short time upon a matter which interests purely the West of Scotland, and therefore anyone who is not interested in that part of the country may immediately withdraw. While it is a local question. it is one that is causing a very great degree of feeling in the West of Scotland—I refer to the act of the Scottish Office in intimating to the Glasgow Veterinary College that they will cease to have any grants from national sources within the next few months. This policy on the part of the Scottish Office will practically mean that Glasgow will cease to have its Veterinary College. The right hon. Gentleman the Secretary for Scotland knows all the circumstances 600 connected with this case. He also knows how great the agricultural interests are in the West of Scotland. He happens to represent a Glasgow constituency. I wish to impress upon him the desirability of not allowing his political influence to prevent him from doing justice to the whole of Scotland in this matter. It is not in the interests of Scotland that this centre of education should be removed from that great industrial centre the City of Glasgow. It stands right in the middle of a great agricultural area. As I pointed out on a previous occasion, it is an area which has contributed something substantial in the realm of animal rearing and breeding to British agricultural life.
Hon. Members are all aware of the famous breed of Clydesdale horses and Ayrshire cattle, and these have their names definitely associated with that area. The right hon. Gentleman is now telling us that we are not to be allowed this old educational centre for training men in the knowledge and care and welfare of the breeding of animals. We are not likely to accept that quietly. To tell us that Edinburgh is to be the only centre for this type of education, is to put a stigma on our part of the country which we are not going to accept lightly. I am not going to detain the House at any length. The Minister is well informed of all the facts, and he has a very definite and short answer. My only hope, in raising the matter here, is that I shall raise such a furore in the agricultural districts of Pollokshaws and Pollokshields—[Laughter]—that, in the course of the month or two before the death-knell of the college is finally sounded, he will see his way, perhaps, to looking at this in a more generous and a wider spirit. It is only a few hundreds of pounds from the national funds that is involved.
Hon. and right hon. Gentlemen on the benches opposite are supposed to be more particularly interested in the agricultural question than we, who are supposed to be the mere industrials, and I want to 601 put it to them that one of the important problems that this Government or some other Government has got to solve within the next few years is that of starting a flow-back of the industrial population into rural occupations; and if the right hon. Gentleman is going to do that in the case of the thickly populated industrial parts, he must have all available centres of education in rural interests and in agricultural matters. Now he is going to withdraw from our midst an institution which has had a very good and honourable record in the years that have gone by. For the sake of a few hundred pounds he is going to withdraw this from our midst, and leave us without this centre at all. I am reminded by my hon. Friend the Member for Gorbals (Mr. Buchanan) that I ought to say that practically all the local authorities in the West of Scotland—education authorities, county councils, town councils, parish councils—are united in the opinion that this college should be maintained. and the Government grant kept up, and I am perfectly certain that every West of Scotland Member in this House holds the same view. I am quite convinced that the right hon. Gentleman, as a Member of Parliament—if one could dissociate his Dr. Jekyll personality from his Mr. Hyde—as a mere Member of Parliament, and not as Secretary for Scotland, would also be an enthusiastic supporter of the continuation of the college. I am now going to give way, after having made this appeal to the right hon. Gentleman, and, over his head, to the electors of the great constituency that he represents, in order that some hon. Member of his own party may add his appeal to mine on this matter.

§ Sir WILLIAM ALEXANDER
Speaking for the first time in this House, I crave the indulgence which is traditional of it. It is singular to me that, in my first participation in the Debates of this House, I should be supporting the hon. Members in Opposition from the Clyde-side, but this is a question which has nothing to do, in my opinion, with politics. In my earlier years I was closely connected, in the West of Scotland. with the breeding of pedigree livestock, and, therefore, I may claim to be some authority on the work which has been carried out by the Veterinary College of Glasgow. The college was established, I believe, in the year 1860. It was incorporated as a Royal College, 602 in affiliation with the Royal Veterinary College and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, in 1862, and I would point out to hon. Members in the House that the work that has been carried out by this College is really concrete and really in the interests of the West of Scotland. In the West of Scotland this college caters for one-half of the total population of Scotland. We have there the great agrarian interests, and we have to an enormous extent cattle-breeding and horse-breeding, in addition to which we have Glasgow as a port through which Canadian and Irish cattle are imported into Scotland. If the veterinary college in Glasgow is not necessary, then it is not necessary in Edinburgh. The Glasgow Veterinary College has been governed and controlled by a board of representative people, representing all the best interests in Glasgow and the West of Scotland. We have on the board representatives of the Glasgow Town Council, of the county councils and of educational authorities, all of which are financial contributors to the college. I do not-blame the present Secretary for Scotland for the attitude he has taken up in this matter. He has come into a legacy which has been handed down to him by a previous Government. Last year,. when I put a question to the then Secretary for Scotland as to the cost of centralising this institution in Edinburgh, I received the answer that the estimated cost of land and laboratories, including apparatus, was £17,550, that central laboratory accommodation for the association would be provided for in the Royal Veterinary College of Edinburg, and the cost of adapting premises within the college was estimated at £1,650. The expenditure for this purpose would be met from the grant of £150,000 provided under Section 3 of the Corn Production (Repeal} Act, 1921. The rent to be paid by the association had not yet been settled.
In view of the contributions from associations in Glasgow and from the public in Glasgow towards the Glasgow institution, and in view of the fact that there is to be an economical saving, I cannot from these figures discover that there will be any economical saving whatever, because, as I understand it, the Glasgow College at present receives from the Scottish Board of Agriculture a-bout 603 £600 per annum, and Glasgow College has been a pioneer in the matter of research and animal diseases. If it is the principle that the Board of Agriculture in Scotland shall disburse out of public funds a sum of close upon £20,000 for the establishment of a research department in Edinburgh, they had better take the matter into full consideration. I think they will find that in Glasgow they can do the job very much cheaper. There is undoubtedly in commercial affairs a natural element of centralisation. Centralisation when the elements arc opportune is undoubtedly good, but this organisation for the development of veterinary education is far removed from the centre of operations and from the centre where those beasts come in the greatest numbers, and I have no hesitation in saying that decentralisation in this case is the best principle. The people in Scotland who attend the Veterinary College in Glasgow are not people of capital. They have to come from the farming elements in Wigtonshire, Ayrshire and llenfrewshire, and if you are going to compel these students to go to Edinburgh and pay their fares to Edinburgh they will have to carry more than it is possible for them to carry. I hope that the Secretary for Scotland will reconsider this decision. I hope and believe that he will come to the decision that, if he cannot agree to the amalgamation without absorption of the Glasgow and Edinburgh Colleges, two colleges are necessary for Scotland.

§ Sir JOHN GILMOUR
The hon. Member who raised this question declared that it was one which interested the West of Scotland. In my judgment, it interests not only the West of Scotland but all Scotland, and it is largely because of that fact that the decision which had been taken by a previous Secretary for Scotland—not by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Fife (Mr. William Adamson), the late Secretary for Scotland, but by a more remote Secretary for Scotland—was arrived at Let 604 me, in a word, for it can only be a word, welcome the speech of the hon. Member for Central Glasgow (Sir W. Alexander). I am sure I am expressing all our views when I say that we hope we may hear him on a future occasion. It is never a very easy task, but is a distasteful task, to say "No" bluntly to one's friends. Hon. Members are aware that I have received a deputation lately on this subject. The decision which has been arrived at, and which was intimated to the Glasgow College two years ago cannot now be departed from. Briefly, the reason is this, that those of us who are interested in agriculture are deeply concerned in veterinary education, and it is essential that that should be of the best, and as in England and Wales there is only one college which receives the Government's direct support, and the same condition prevails in Ireland, so I am afraid it must be in Scotland. I do not take the view that this will cause harm to the agriculturists in the West of Scotland, nor will it be an end to the college as an agricultural college. I am willing and anxious to assist them in pursuing their agricultural avocation. When this problem was placed before me I was asked whether this would cease to be a central institution. So far as I am aware, it will not, and if local authorities desire still to give support to this agricultural college they will be at liberty to do so.
I am afraid that I can add nothing to the replies which I gave to the deputation which saw me at the Scottish Office. I can only add that I am awaiting the report which the deputation promised to send me with regard to the gap between the end of the financial year and the year of the college. That is the only problem which is outstanding, and it is one to which I will give very careful consideration.