What is devolution for? Ask different people and you’ll
get different answers. Those old enough will remember the Scottish Constitutional Convention. The parties and organisations that met more or less
were united in what they thought devolution was for. It had two goals. The
first and most important was that if England voted Conservative, as it had been
doing in the 80s and early 90s, then Scotland would still be ruled by the
left. The second goal was that devolution would kill off the SNP. The Liberals
and Labour, the main two parties that were part of the Constitutional
Convention, thought they had a clever wheeze. The expectation was that there
would be a permanent Lib/Lab pact in the Scottish Assembly. For this reason, I
suspect, neither the Conservatives nor the SNP took part. The Conservatives
knew it was a stitch up and the SNP only ever wanted independence.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I try to avoid
making party political points against Better Together friends, but let’s be
clear we made an almighty hash of devolution in 1997. How’s it working out in
terms of its goals? Did it succeed in killing off nationalism? Far from it, if
there is one thing that can be pointed to as being responsible for the rise of
Scottish nationalism, it’s the Scottish parliament. In time the SNP realised
their folly in boycotting the Constitutional Convention. People like Alex
Salmond knew that rather than make one giant leap to independence he could make
little steps. The first steps had been made for him. Some rather foolish people
began speaking grandiosely about Holyrood as if somehow we were
returning to the time before 1707. We built an enormous building and made
claims about the sovereignty of the Scottish people. We began to act as if
Scotland were a nation state. Salmond took this further by renaming the
Scottish Executive as the Scottish Government and acting as if he were a
national leader in the same sense as Angela Merkel or François Hollande. Each
time, he was making one of those little steps towards independence.
So now there’s no Lib/Lab pact in Holyrood and
unlikely to be one in the near future and 44% of the Scottish people voted for
independence. When I was a child this was a fringe issue that strange men in
tweeds, who wore kilts all day, used to support. So how is devolution working out
for you?
In order to make progress we have to answer the question what is devolution for? The answer for No voters must be that it is for
strengthening the UK. This is the mistake that we made in 1997. The issue of
devolution was treated on its own by Scotland rather than as a whole by the UK.
People thought that if we only made some concessions to the nationalists we
would kill of nationalism. This is simply false. Nationalists want more
devolution in order to bring about independence. It is not our task to help
them. Rather it is our task to hinder them. Don’t make concessions to
nationalists. They’ll bite your hand off and then your whole arm with it.
I am not opposed to devolution. There are countries
with masses of devolution that work well, for example Germany, Australia, USA.
In these countries the answer to the question “what is devolution for?” is that
it brings power to local people at a state level while maintaining a strong
stable and united country at the national level. Devolution works in these
countries because every citizen in every part of these countries has a similar
degree of local power. Imagine if Texas had devolution, but Vermont did not.
Would this help or hinder the unity of the USA? Unequal devolution foments division.
Devolution can only work if a country is not
continually threatened with breaking up. If the answer to the “question what is
devolution for?” is so that , for instance, Bavaria can regain the independence
it lost in 1871, then the answer will be that Germany requires more
centralisation not more devolution. The condition for the possibility of
maximum amounts of devolution is that there is not a continual rebellion against
the centre.
The three main party leaders made “a vow” to extend
devolution. This really was no more than a concise statement of what they had all
said throughout the summer. There is nothing in this vow that I disagree with. But it is important to realise what it is and what
it is not. It is promising extensive new powers. The parties at the time of “the
vow” had different ideas of what that would mean, therefore it was deliberately vague. We are now debating it further.
No-one has ever promised devo-max. That’s just something the SNP made up to
break the Union. Moreover, every promise has a context. When promising more
devolution, the party leaders were answering the question “what is devolution
for?” with the answer in order to strengthen the unity of the UK. After all, they were
campaigning against independence. Besides “the vow” was obviously made in the context
of the Edinburgh Agreement. If the SNP refuse to accept the democratic will of
the people in Scotland, if they refuse to cease fighting for independence, at
least in the short term, then I’m sorry but we have no obligation to them. “The
vow” anyway was made to No voters. How can we best keep it?
We must devolve equally across the UK. I do not want
to have a right or a privilege that my fellow British citizen lacks. There are
different ways to allow England to have as much devolution as the other parts
of the UK. But fundamentally it is up to English people, not people like me, to
determine what they want. Just as Labour and the Liberals were mistaken when
they put party before country in setting up the Scottish parliament, so the
Conservatives would be mistaken if they put party before country in setting up
English devolution. It must be possible for national government to rule effectively
over the whole of the UK and no party should be structurally disadvantaged. But Labour can’t
expect to push through matters that only affect England if they lack a majority
there. You can’t set up a Scottish parliament in order to avoid Tory rule in
Scotland and expect to rule England when it has a Tory majority. That’s unfair.
There is a solution. But only if parties rise above party difference and act
for the good of the UK.
As we devolve so we must unify. We must cease
helping the nationalists. The SNP sees its task as continually to emphasise the
separateness of Scotland and to act always as if Scotland were already an
independent nation state. They only really have one good argument. Scotland is
a country, therefore Scotland ought to be an independent country. If you think
that Scotland is a nation in the same way that France is a nation, you should
have voted for independence. If you think Scotland has sovereignty you likewise
should have voted for independence. The
key task of bringing unity to the UK is to recognise that although Scotland is
called a country we are no different from the parts of Australia, USA or
Germany. Again if you don’t believe this, then you should have voted for
independence.
Through some quirks of history we use the word “Scottish”
rather a lot. Everything is separate in Scotland. Whereas everyone else has the
RSPCA we have the SPCA. This would be fine if it were once in a while. But it
is relentless. Everything in Scotland from adverts to charities to professional
organisations is prefixed by "Scottish". The same does not apply to Saxony, Maryland
or Queensland. Likewise none of these states have international football and
rugby teams. It is anachronistic and absurd that a place that is not an
independent nation state takes part in international sporting competitions.
No-one else does. It might seem harmless. But it is not. It is the thing that
most feeds nationalism in Scotland.
We will not put the nationalist genie back in the
bottle quickly, but gradually we must work towards a new common identity in
Britain. This requires the use more often than not of common symbols and less
often than not of symbols of division and separateness.
When Lincoln towards the end of the Civil War said that they were
“testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can
long endure.” he was articulating that there is not a universal right to
secession. Democracy triumphed in the United States precisely because the Civil
War made it clear that it would be united for ever. We too in the United Kingdom
can “have a new birth of freedom” devolving to the most local of levels, but
only if we unite also and accept that the war is over. People threatening to
take matters into their own hands, people who continue fighting after the battle
has been won clearly have no understanding of nor love of democracy and
freedom. They are the enemies of devolution and the main obstacle to its being
extended to the maximum amount possible.
If you like my writing, please follow the link to my book Scarlet on the Horizon. The first five chapters can be read
as a preview.