Tam Dalyell of the Binns(1932–2017)

Sir Thomas Dalyell Loch was born at Edinburgh on the ninth of August 1932, only child of Captain Gordon Loch of the Royal Engineers and Eleanor Isabel Dalyell of the Binns, the family of the seventeenth-century Royalist general Sir Thomas Dalyell who had served under Charles II at Worcester and commanded the King's army in Scotland. The Loch line took the Dalyell name on the mother's inheritance of the baronetcy and the family seat at the Binns in West Lothian. He was schooled at Eton, did National Service in the Royal Scots Greys 1950 to 1952, took his MA at King's College, Cambridge, in 1956, and taught modern studies at Bo'ness Academy and at the Edinburgh Academy through the late 1950s.

He was elected Labour member of Parliament for West Lothian at the June 1962 by-election in his thirtieth year, taking the seat with a thirteen-thousand majority on the back of the local mining vote. He held the seat (renamed Linlithgow in 1983 boundary changes) for the next forty-three years to his retirement in May 2005. He served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Richard Crossman in the first Wilson government (1964 to 1970), Vice-Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party (1974 to 1976), and on the Select Committee on European Legislation through the long Labour and Conservative parliaments of the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1977, during the parliamentary passage of the Scotland Bill (the first abortive devolution attempt of the Callaghan government), he framed the constitutional question that has been carried in his name ever since: if Scottish MPs at Westminster retained the right to vote on legislation affecting only England, while English MPs would lose the right to vote on matters devolved to a Scottish parliament, the asymmetry undermined the constitutional logic of devolution. The question, named the West Lothian Question by Enoch Powell in the debate on Dalyell's amendment in November 1977, became the central unresolved constitutional question of the devolution settlements of 1998 and 1999, and was the framing of the English Votes for English Laws procedure introduced at the Commons in 2015 (twelve years before its repeal in 2021).

He campaigned through the long 1980s and 1990s as one of the foremost parliamentary investigators of executive accountability, pursued the Westland affair, the Belgrano sinking of 1982 (his sustained inquiry into the position and orders of the Argentinian cruiser at the time of the torpedo attack), the Pergau Dam affair, and the long campaign for the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi on humanitarian grounds. He inherited the baronetcy on his cousin's death in 1972, becoming 11th Baronet of the Binns, was appointed Father of the House of Commons on the fall of Edward Heath in May 2001, and held the precedence from 2001 to his retirement in April 2005. He died at the Binns on the twenty-sixth of January 2017 in his eighty-fifth year. The Dalziel name in modern Scottish public life carries the weight of the West Lothian Question and the forty-three-year backbench career.