Amongst the British policymaking class, devolution is very much an article of faith. To the sort of person who still hopes against hope for the implementation of Redcliff-Maud, it goes without saying that the United Kingdom is one of the most centralised countries on Earth, and that’s why [insert problem here] hasn’t been fixed yet.
It helps that this position often suits the politicians. Driving forward devolution allows a prime minister to be Doing Something without taking ownership of delivering actual outcomes; if your plan for growth is focused on devolution, as is Sir Keir Starmer’s, what that really means is making it someone else’s problem.
There have for a while been two broad problems with the Devolution Theory of Everything. The first is the need to explain away why it hasn’t worked to date; Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have some of the most powerful non-sovereign legislatures on the planet, and they have so far been mechanisms for turning significantly higher per-capita state spending into even more significantly poorer public services.
A ‘real devolution has never been tried’ exists in the form of full fiscal autonomy. The problem with this, as I noted in 2023 after attending the Doncaster conference of the Northern Research Group of Conservative MPs, is that actually delivering that for any part of the country with a fiscal transfer deficit with the Treasury would constitute radical libertarian medicine of the sort of strength it historically takes the like of General Pinochet to deliver.
But the other problem with the Devolution Theory of Everything is, as Simon Case noted in the Financial Times over the weekend, that it’s underlying premise hasn’t been true for a long time:
“The UK’s long-held reputation for highly centralised power when compared with other nations is no longer accurate. Across our four nations, an increasing number of English devolution settlements, independent quangos and arm’s length bodies, courts, statutory consultees and the like, block the path from what a winning political party promises at an election to what it can then achieve in power.
“If you happen to be a business working at the cutting edge of a new technology, a smaller housebuilder trying to fulfil local housing needs, a younger worker trying to get on the housing ladder or a minister wanting to deliver improvements in public and private productivity, this status quo is a nightmarish quagmire. And if you believe that democracy should be upheld, through a reasonably balanced equation of change promised and change delivered, this dangerous muddle of powers and responsibilities should be a cause for alarm.”
From the perspective not only of its governments but of anyone trying to build or do anything in it, modern Britain could be fairly described as a vetocracy, with lots of concentrations of negative, inertial power which can block without internalising the costs of blocking. But as Case notes:
“The vast majority of these vetoes have been willingly, if ignorantly, handed over by parliament over many years. It has been done without totalling up the sum of power assigned further and further away from our democratically accountable politicians.”
It is not that devolution is now exclusively to blame. Parliament retains the power to assert itself against all comers, should it choose to; MPs simply choose not to. The power to expedite the Abingdon Reservoir was on the statute book (via the Planning Act 2008) for the entire 14 years of the Conservatives’ most recent period in office, yet they failed to do it.
Likewise, Labour has an enormous majority and thus, on paper, the power to do whatever it likes. Yet as the Prime Minister is learning (slowly), a big majority will avail him little if it isn’t ready to vote for anything. Having signally failed to prepare his MPs for the need to make unpopular decisions, he and Rachel Reeves have now broken their own staffs, and face a miserable four years staggering along the fraying Overton Tightrope between this country’s uncontrollable revenue expenditures and the limits of their ability to raise cash.
But bad as that is, there is one big advantage to it, as Case again points out: “For all the frustrations that ministers undoubtedly feel about MPs wielding their right of veto over changes to welfare, at least that veto operated in plain sight.” We know who is responsible, and everyone is talking about it.
That is much less often the case elsewhere. In Scotland and Wales, the devocrats are past masters of exploiting the public’s hazy perception of who is responsible for what – created in part by their deliberately collecting data on non-comparable bases with England – and run endless variations on the rubric ‘the fault lies elsewhere, the solution is more powers for us’. Devolution in England allows similar blame-shifting.
One of the big problems with devolution is that the sort of plans dreamed up by the sort of person who enjoys designing elaborate governance arrangements tend to far exceed the average voter’s level of engagement in politics. If ‘popular legibility’ were properly considered as an essential criteria when attempting to redraw the constitution, the merits of so frightfully unmodern an idea as having a national parliament which made the important decisions would seem more obvious.
Case is correct that any future government that wishes to actually change this country’s long-term trajectory is going to have to take back control of the state. That will require an actual plan: it is not enough to chunter on about a bonfire of the quangos if one hasn’t decided what to do with the powers they wield, for example; returning decision-making to Parliament would almost certainly require MPs scrapping Robin Cook’s reforms to their sitting hours.
But any such plan would depend ultimately on the ability of any party to select and return to Parliament some four hundred people prepared to actually wield power – and it has been a very long time since that happened.
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Author: Henry Hill
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