English devolution: better to get it right than get it quickly
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Version 0 of 1. States go wrong when statesmen make avoidable mistakes. Southern backwoodsmen tried to break up the United States over slavery in 1861. A few years later Napoleon III was tricked into attacking Prussia by Bismark. Britain fatally failed to make its intentions clear to Germany in 1914 and put sterling back on the deflationary gold standard in 1925. George Bush went into Iraq on half-baked planning. And so on. By this test, is David Cameron sleepwalking into a breakup of the United Kingdom, something not even Vladimir Putin wants to see – though fellow-nationalists, Alex Salmond and Nigel Farage are big fans – as he seeks to handle the Scottish (not to mention the EU) dimensions of policy for tactical party advantage? It sounded so yesterday when William Hague set out the coalition’s own half-baked ideas for addressing the famous West Lothian question – why should West Lothian’s Scottish MP vote at Westminster on matters pertaining to West Bromwich? As wise Jack Straw observed in the subsequent exchanges, neither Hague nor his party are best placed to pronounce on this subject, since they opposed Scots and Welsh devolution as well as a devolved, elected mayor for London. They subsequently changed their mind on that too – so that 15 English cities now have elected mayors, though citizens given local referendums on the subject said no (except in Bristol). Straw also remarked that the West Lothian issue is “a bigger problem in theory than in practice”. That’s true too. Tory and Labour governments were both happy to use Northern Irish Unionist votes from 1921 to the devolved Stormont parliament’s temporary abolition in 1972. Only briefly have Westminster governments ever depended on Scottish votes or so-called “English-only legislation” either. What’s changed is that the SNP-led clamour for independence on the back of the party’s fluke majority win at Holyrood in 2011 means it is in Edinburgh’s perceived self-interest to foment discontent against Westminster. That inevitably stirs up latent nationalist sentiment of the UK’s English majority – along with the fear that they must be losing out to ungrateful Scots who seem to get treated better for their complaints. Hague’s four proposals yesterday – you can read the Hansard here – were received without much enthusiasm. He politely offered the Lib Dem plan for English regional federalism where it is wanted (it wasn’t wanted when John Prescott staged a pilot referendum in the north-east), plus three Tory mechanisms for giving English MPs a block on English-only (mostly?) laws at Westminster. The Guardian’s excellent two-part series – here and here – revealed that the no campaign leader, Alistair Darling, warned Cameron not to link the Smith commission plan for enhanced powers to Scotland – published last month – with the Evel (English votes for English laws) dimension in his post-result speech. Cameron preferred to stick to his pre-drafted text. It gave the Nats fresh momentum and a whole new “betrayal” script, which helps them distract voters’ attention from the collapsing world price of Scotland’s famous oil. Hague actually claimed that the coalition had engaged in “the most radical programme of decentralisation in England for decades”. That’s cheeky. The Tories abolished regional development agencies (RDAs), whose record was patchy, but were superior instruments to their replacement, local enterprise partnerships (LEPs). Police commissioners were imposed, not very successfully. Welcome though they are, the “northern powerhouse” plans take ministers back to near where Labour was a decade ago. Success story Manchester is having a mayor imposed. Eric “localism” Pickles is a byword for central authority, his chief localist achievement being to decentralise the pain of council cuts. Ditto the NHS reforms. There is renewed talk of consolidating the 43 English and Welsh police forces into 20, a step the devolved centralisers at Holyrood have already taken. It’s improvised and patchy, not much theory there, very British. But it’s too important to be rushed. So I suspect that – this time anyway – Labour is right to say there should be a constitutional convention to try and impose some coherence on what we are trying to do and why. England is so huge in comparison with its island neighbours – 54 million of the 64 million people in the UK – that the very idea of the majority being “threatened” by Celtic minorities is the stuff of 3am nightmares that vanish with daylight. That’s not to say people don’t have legitimate worries, but this shouldn’t be about whether Labour loses its Scottish contingent in forming a UK government or short-term Tory advantage. It’s more important than that, much more important, and should be treated as such. As with Europe, where he has also been surprisingly cavalier (not consulting lawyers or diplomats on his recent immigration speech), Cameron must try harder if he wants to be remembered as constructive statesmen in tough times. As things stand Cameron and his inner circle run the risk of being remembered, if at all, as third-rate chancers, Napoleon IIIs not Abraham Lincolns, who failed to measure up to events, broke up and diminished the state. |