We never seem to take a break from politics in Scotland. European elections. A referendum. A general election. A Scottish Parliament election. And then - just when it looked for a few moments at least that there would be some blessed respite from people spouting nonsense in the name of their false gods - a European referendum.
It seems there is always an excuse to knock on someone's door and tell them about education policy. On balance, this is likely a good thing. If a politician is knocking at your door he can't be doing something dreadful - like passing some unutterably stupid law or raising taxes on hard-working (hang on a second... ed.) 30-somethings who just want a glass of vino collapso at the end of the day.
A lot of tosh has been written since our Prime Minister came back from Brussels telling us all about his deal to give us special status within the European Union. As a known peddler of tosh it was inevitable I would get involved. When in doubt, add verbiage.
If we leave life will go on. Whether this is good for the country that is difficult to know but any negotiations will likely be messy and extended. The nature of negotiations is you don't get everything you want - no matter how strong your position is, no matter how good a negotiator you are.
So some thoughts for both sides::
Leave cannot argue that Eurocrats have poked their nose into every aspect of British life whilst simultaneously arguing that extracting ourselves from the Union could be done at the stroke of a pen. There would, surely, be months of negotiation, talks, rows, detail and minutiae. Policy for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Lots of business for lawyers (no shame in that. Far from it!) but these things won't be easy.
On the one hand you have a Britain that has told all of the other Member States to get raffled and on the other side you have 27 other Member States all simultaneously jockeying for position, quelling their own insurgent movements, trying to ensure Britain doesn't get too plum a deal but also realising that they do probably need access to our markets and that - until we formally leave - all UK citizens remain EU citizens.
All of that looks about as messy as a clown's tea party and about as fun as walking to work in wet socks. A golden rule in life is: Never trust a politician. If you want a platinum-plated rule? Never trust a politician who tells things will be easy.
Leave seem to be a mix of shysters, saloon bar loudmouths and bulging brain types who wear bow ties and can do sums without a calculator. None of them, however, can tell what Britain would look like out. Some jingoistic types see us becoming a great trading and seafaring nation looking out across the azure main. Others believe we will play the great game with Russia, India and China. Others don't answer: it will be ours to decide. That is terrifying. For all the Scottish Government's white paper was lies built on nonsense built on Del Boy-esque financial projections they at least had a vision of what they hoped an independent Scotland would look like and put it before the people.
For Leave: it is a blank slate. Or, worse, we have Galloway arguing for some Socialist Utopia whilst Farage is arguing for a country where he can drink drive and slap the secretary arse without being hauled over the coals. It is nonsense.
At the same time, the Remainians are tubby types skating on particularly thin ice. If you truly believe in the European project and you believe that Ever Closer Union is a good thing then surely it is difficult to defend our Prime Minister's claims that we are no longer tied into Ever Closer Union. Indeed, if that is the goal of everybody else and that - at some point down the line we move towards some federalised state - doesn't that make us a kind of North Atlantic Puerto Rico? There's nothing wrong with Puerto Rico. I've seen it on Man vs Food and the sandwiches looked fantastic but if the direction of travel is to a federal state do we really want to be the oddbods who can't get our former PMs on stamps?
Putting Mr Cameron's deal to one side, Remain also have to watch their arguments over ''what has the EU ever done for us?'. Some of the claims are, shall we say, exaggerated (the Equal Pay Act - for instance - predates our membership of the European Union by five years).
Some of the claims make Leave's point for them. If, as Remain claims, the EU is responsible for health and safety, parental leave, part-time workers rights, smoke-free workplaces (eh?), holiday entitlements, Europe-wide patent protection, lead free petrol, cheaper air travel, a recycling culture (double eh?), clean beaches and the Working Time Directive then there are two problems.
Firstly, Remain admits and acknowledges that the scope of legislation from Brussels is actually quite wide and perhaps wider than many Britons would want (and certainly wider than what the British public voted for in 1975).
Secondly, by suggesting that we only have many workers rights (as the TUC has this week) because of our membership of the EU the argument rather suggests that we aren't to be trusted with the our own government. If the people of Britain really want a party to axe their holiday entitlement then why the bally hell shouldn't they be free to do so? Plenty of countries around the world have managed such protections without membership of the European Union.
The problem is much of this is more technical than the public wants and more technical than the politicians are willing or able to debate. EU Directives, for instance, actually give state legislatures wide-ranging freedom. As one lawyer noted to me, we could amend half the transposing legislation with a Statutory Instrument overnight. If Britain has chosen to transpose these things in a stupid way that is Britain's fault.
Nobody wants to talk about Statutory Instruments or transposition or Directives. They want to talk about straight bananas and two parliaments and 'elf 'n safety. Sometimes, admittedly, they want to talk about sovereignty but dashed few people know what they themselves mean by sovereignty let alone what anyone else means. What is sovereignty in the 21st century? I don't have the foggiest.
Ultimately what we will see over the next few months is both sides doing what I've done above - picking holes in the other side whilst pretending the holes in their own side don't matter.
On the one hand, The European Union is an undemocratic mess, there is little transparency and seems incapable of reform. It makes Westminster look like a model of good governance. It takes credit for things it hasn't done (the EU won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012.
The EU - strictly speaking - has existed since 1993. Is peace in Europe - a wonderful thing that we take for granted - down to the EU and its predecessors? Or was it NATO and the Marshall Plan? Does the EU really get the credit for entrenching human rights across Europe or does that honour really go to the European Convention on Human Rights? For a faceless organisation it does remarkable PR for itself.
On the other hand, it has improved some aspects of our lives immeasurably. It has incorporated post-communist countries to their betterment (just think about the EU now and think about the world in 1989. It is astonishing). Britons have, generally, benefitted as has British business.
The direction of travel for the EU is at points terrifying and at points exhilarating. On balance, Remain is the safest choice. It is not a flawless one. It is merely less flawed than Leave.
RCM
Tuesday, 23 February 2016
Wednesday, 13 May 2015
Some thoughts on English devolution
Devolution across these islands has generally been done in a piecemeal and sporadic way. This fits with the piecemeal and sporadic nature of our constitution and with approach to these things over centuries. The old line that 'devolution is a process rather than an event' misunderstands that in the UK the constitution is a process.
What we've seen, since the late 1990s, is varying degrees of devolution to various parts of the UK.
Scotland has her parliament whereas Wales, Northern Ireland and London all have assemblies - all with varying degrees of power. The Scottish Parliament had more power devolved to it as part of the Scotland Act 2012 (most of those powers come online this year - see for reference the LBTT introduction a few weeks ago) and more will be devolved coming out of the Smith Commission. More will likely follow.
One of the problems is that this fairly dry technocratic stuff isn't well understood. Large swathes of the Scottish public have no idea what is devolved and what isn't (indeed, there are numerous examples of the Scottish Government not knowing what was devolved and reserved so we can't really complain about Joe Public not knowing the finer details).
Wales too has seen more power devolved in recent years. The difference in speed and nature of what is devolved is largely down to a difference in desire for devolution between the people of Scotland and the people of Wales (the Welsh, after all, only narrowly voted in favour of devolution at all), different natures of the nationalist parties (and wider nationalist movements), and different histories. Scotland has always had a separate education system, a separate legal system, and a separate church. There is an argument that Scottish nationalism only exists because of the nature of the Treaty of Union and its provisions. Another day! There are also examples of devolution that precede formal parliamentary devolution in the late 1990s (for instance, the establishment of the Scottish Funding Council in 1993 which has different responsibilities to funding councils elsewhere in the UK).
The point of devolution, of course, is to devolve decision-making to various areas of the country and which allows them to set their own policies. This necessarily has led to some divergence of policy between the four nations in the UK and, inevitably, this has caused some (minimal) tensions - how come they get free prescriptions and all that jazz. The issue shouldn't be ''how do they get free prescriptions'' but, rather, ''why have they made that policy choice and why can't we/why haven't we?'.
All of this devolving, and all those free prescriptions, have led some some English voices to say ''but what about England?'. The problem is: England as a whole doesn't seem to want devolution. There is just some grumbling about the asymetrical nature of what has happened thus far, some grumbling about ''how come Scottish folk get to vote on matters that don't affect them' and, of course, an increasing sense that London is too powerful. None of this really suggests some grand desire for devolution but rather the British tendency to moan.
England has existed as a concept for over a millenium (though must have been extinguished legally in 1707 if Scotland was extinguished legally at that time) but today fairly few people see themselves as distinctly English bar supporting the football and rugby teams. Many English people see themselves as British (and see, unlike identity elsewhere in the UK, their national identity and their supra-national identity as essentially broadly similar things. Even Scottish unionists don't quite see Scottishness and Britishness as the same thing). Those that do see themselves as English are not, in the way the people of Scotland were in the 1990s, chomping at the bit for devolution to England. If they are it is reactive (as above - but what about England) rather than positive.
When the people of the North East were offered devolution, they said 'No ta'. And that's the problem with offering devolution. In reality, people need to want it and ask for it rather than not being too fussed and offered it. Without the desire for decision-making it doesn't work. Many discussions of devolution in England are met with rolled eyes and ''not another layer of bloody government''. It seems that devolution in England has to equal a reduced role for MPs at Westminster and/or reform of the current local authority structure.
I realise the next paragraph is especially dull but it is important to realise just how much government happens in England. England is currently divided into nine regions (which have pretty much no role barring London). Below the regional level (excluding London) England has two different patterns of local government in use. Forgetting, for a moment, the sui generis position of the City of London and the Isles of Scilly, there are 55 ''single tier'' authorities (e.g. county councils). There are 34 upper tier authorities (27 non-metropolitan counties, 6 metropolitan counties and the GLA). And, below the upper tier authorities authorities there are 269 lower tier authorities (201 non-metropolitan districts, 36 metropolitan boroughs, and 32 London boroughs). There are, of course, constituencies for Westminster on top all of that.
It is a bit of a jumble and no wonder many are wary of more government, more paper pushers, more bureaucracy and more tax dollar. You can almost see the Guardian jobs pages now full of roles for advisors, wonks and so forth all at cushty salaries.
As well as all of this jumble, we now have the concept of City Regions being rushed through. You know the sort of thing. Northern Powerhouse. Etc. Under this theory power should be devolved to power economic growth. No bad thing growth but there must, in my view, be more to devolution than that.
More importantly than all that, people need to believe that they belong to the place that is getting the devolved power. That is easy in Scotland. It is easy in Wales. It is even easy in the London city state idea. It is less obvious in the North East and North West. Most people in the North West don't define themselves as that. They may say they are Lancastrians. Or Scousers. Or Mancunians. Or Cumbrians. But never North Westerners. The same is true of Yorkshire. And Northumbria. I doubt many people just outside Manchester view themselves as Mancunian. Those people from Wigan and Burnley and Rochdale and so forth will probably sing the songs of Lancashire.
The current idea of devolution in England seems to be ''devo Manc'' which sees devolution to the Greater Manchester Area. But why the big cities and not Cheshire and Oxfordshire? The problem with devolving power to cities (especially without wider reform) is that you have a great hodgepodge of devolved matters and other areas of the country (the shires) which do not have devolution. Who speaks for them? Some rump parliament in London dominated, no doubt, by Shire Tories? That way lies madness. Forget about the West Lothian question, we begin to have the West Didsbury question: why can an MP in Manchester, who represents an area with some kind of devolution, vote on matters that don't affect her constituents?
Devo Manc, to me, sounds like the sort of thing that a management consultant might come up with to assuage a client. It is ''we need to do something. Here is something. Therefore we need to do it'' territory. The consultant knows he'll get more business in a year when it doesn't work because the client doesn't know what he is doing. It makes economic sense. It might even make political sense in the short-term. Does it make sense in the grander scheme of things? Hmmm.
If devolution is to be foisted on the English, would it make more sense (and would it be more palatable) to consider the ancient identities that still inform many an Englishman's view of himself?
This would see a reorganisation of the jumble approach above (and soon to be greater jumble) and returning to regions which people do understand and have some affection towards. It would also minimise the problem of ''what is to be done with the Shires?'.
In the North, that would see Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumbria/Cumberland and Northumbria become regions to which power could be devolved. Yorkshire is roughly the size of Scotland in terms of population. Lancashire larger again (if it covered Liverpool and Manchester - as it should). Northumbria, covering Sunderland, Newcastle and Middlesborough, isn't so huge but still a sizeable place. Durham could either feature as part of Northumbria or return to a modern day County Palatinate status (Cheshire too - Cestrians aren't, and have never been, part of Lancashire).
Elsewhere, Mercia covering Birmingham and the Midlands; East Anglia covering Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire (and potentially Essex); Wessex covering its traditional area (Bristol area through to the edge of Sussex); Sussex; Kent; and Cornwall. Not perfect by any stretch but I wonder if it would be more successful. People in England do understand these areas and, to admittedly varying degrees, have some loyalty and affection towards them. There will be some who wish to redraw some of my boundaries. There will be some who point out Mercia doesn't have the same pull as Lancashire or Yorkshire and therefore my own theory falls. Perhaps.
It is likely that this would be more palatable in a federal UK. Rather than England being dominant you would have numerous English regions all represented (and all with competing interests). Many would be similarly sized (or bigger) than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland but not behemoths.
It won't happen, of course. The response to Scotland's push for ever greater powers (entirely consistent with the process of devolution, of course) from English cities is understandable. A United Kingdom of a parliament at the Palace of Westminster, an ever more powerful parliament in Holyrood, an ever more powerful assembly in Wales and an assembly in Stormont makes some sense (even if not everyone signs up to it).
All of that with various city regions across England only intensifies the problems that currently exist. Who speaks for Cheshire or Oxfordshire under such a model? What is the point of EVEL (and killing off EVEL wouldn't exactly be the end of the world) under such a system - would shire MPs be able to vote on everything, City MPs on some things, Scottish MPs on fewer things again? It doesn't make very much sense.
Better to really consider devolution across England properly and that must be all England - either as I've described or the less palatable idea of a devolved parliament in England and all the power issues that comes with. And, of course, that will lead to some level of reform at Westminster too.
RCM
What we've seen, since the late 1990s, is varying degrees of devolution to various parts of the UK.
Scotland has her parliament whereas Wales, Northern Ireland and London all have assemblies - all with varying degrees of power. The Scottish Parliament had more power devolved to it as part of the Scotland Act 2012 (most of those powers come online this year - see for reference the LBTT introduction a few weeks ago) and more will be devolved coming out of the Smith Commission. More will likely follow.
One of the problems is that this fairly dry technocratic stuff isn't well understood. Large swathes of the Scottish public have no idea what is devolved and what isn't (indeed, there are numerous examples of the Scottish Government not knowing what was devolved and reserved so we can't really complain about Joe Public not knowing the finer details).
Wales too has seen more power devolved in recent years. The difference in speed and nature of what is devolved is largely down to a difference in desire for devolution between the people of Scotland and the people of Wales (the Welsh, after all, only narrowly voted in favour of devolution at all), different natures of the nationalist parties (and wider nationalist movements), and different histories. Scotland has always had a separate education system, a separate legal system, and a separate church. There is an argument that Scottish nationalism only exists because of the nature of the Treaty of Union and its provisions. Another day! There are also examples of devolution that precede formal parliamentary devolution in the late 1990s (for instance, the establishment of the Scottish Funding Council in 1993 which has different responsibilities to funding councils elsewhere in the UK).
The point of devolution, of course, is to devolve decision-making to various areas of the country and which allows them to set their own policies. This necessarily has led to some divergence of policy between the four nations in the UK and, inevitably, this has caused some (minimal) tensions - how come they get free prescriptions and all that jazz. The issue shouldn't be ''how do they get free prescriptions'' but, rather, ''why have they made that policy choice and why can't we/why haven't we?'.
All of this devolving, and all those free prescriptions, have led some some English voices to say ''but what about England?'. The problem is: England as a whole doesn't seem to want devolution. There is just some grumbling about the asymetrical nature of what has happened thus far, some grumbling about ''how come Scottish folk get to vote on matters that don't affect them' and, of course, an increasing sense that London is too powerful. None of this really suggests some grand desire for devolution but rather the British tendency to moan.
England has existed as a concept for over a millenium (though must have been extinguished legally in 1707 if Scotland was extinguished legally at that time) but today fairly few people see themselves as distinctly English bar supporting the football and rugby teams. Many English people see themselves as British (and see, unlike identity elsewhere in the UK, their national identity and their supra-national identity as essentially broadly similar things. Even Scottish unionists don't quite see Scottishness and Britishness as the same thing). Those that do see themselves as English are not, in the way the people of Scotland were in the 1990s, chomping at the bit for devolution to England. If they are it is reactive (as above - but what about England) rather than positive.
When the people of the North East were offered devolution, they said 'No ta'. And that's the problem with offering devolution. In reality, people need to want it and ask for it rather than not being too fussed and offered it. Without the desire for decision-making it doesn't work. Many discussions of devolution in England are met with rolled eyes and ''not another layer of bloody government''. It seems that devolution in England has to equal a reduced role for MPs at Westminster and/or reform of the current local authority structure.
I realise the next paragraph is especially dull but it is important to realise just how much government happens in England. England is currently divided into nine regions (which have pretty much no role barring London). Below the regional level (excluding London) England has two different patterns of local government in use. Forgetting, for a moment, the sui generis position of the City of London and the Isles of Scilly, there are 55 ''single tier'' authorities (e.g. county councils). There are 34 upper tier authorities (27 non-metropolitan counties, 6 metropolitan counties and the GLA). And, below the upper tier authorities authorities there are 269 lower tier authorities (201 non-metropolitan districts, 36 metropolitan boroughs, and 32 London boroughs). There are, of course, constituencies for Westminster on top all of that.
It is a bit of a jumble and no wonder many are wary of more government, more paper pushers, more bureaucracy and more tax dollar. You can almost see the Guardian jobs pages now full of roles for advisors, wonks and so forth all at cushty salaries.
As well as all of this jumble, we now have the concept of City Regions being rushed through. You know the sort of thing. Northern Powerhouse. Etc. Under this theory power should be devolved to power economic growth. No bad thing growth but there must, in my view, be more to devolution than that.
More importantly than all that, people need to believe that they belong to the place that is getting the devolved power. That is easy in Scotland. It is easy in Wales. It is even easy in the London city state idea. It is less obvious in the North East and North West. Most people in the North West don't define themselves as that. They may say they are Lancastrians. Or Scousers. Or Mancunians. Or Cumbrians. But never North Westerners. The same is true of Yorkshire. And Northumbria. I doubt many people just outside Manchester view themselves as Mancunian. Those people from Wigan and Burnley and Rochdale and so forth will probably sing the songs of Lancashire.
The current idea of devolution in England seems to be ''devo Manc'' which sees devolution to the Greater Manchester Area. But why the big cities and not Cheshire and Oxfordshire? The problem with devolving power to cities (especially without wider reform) is that you have a great hodgepodge of devolved matters and other areas of the country (the shires) which do not have devolution. Who speaks for them? Some rump parliament in London dominated, no doubt, by Shire Tories? That way lies madness. Forget about the West Lothian question, we begin to have the West Didsbury question: why can an MP in Manchester, who represents an area with some kind of devolution, vote on matters that don't affect her constituents?
Devo Manc, to me, sounds like the sort of thing that a management consultant might come up with to assuage a client. It is ''we need to do something. Here is something. Therefore we need to do it'' territory. The consultant knows he'll get more business in a year when it doesn't work because the client doesn't know what he is doing. It makes economic sense. It might even make political sense in the short-term. Does it make sense in the grander scheme of things? Hmmm.
If devolution is to be foisted on the English, would it make more sense (and would it be more palatable) to consider the ancient identities that still inform many an Englishman's view of himself?
This would see a reorganisation of the jumble approach above (and soon to be greater jumble) and returning to regions which people do understand and have some affection towards. It would also minimise the problem of ''what is to be done with the Shires?'.
In the North, that would see Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumbria/Cumberland and Northumbria become regions to which power could be devolved. Yorkshire is roughly the size of Scotland in terms of population. Lancashire larger again (if it covered Liverpool and Manchester - as it should). Northumbria, covering Sunderland, Newcastle and Middlesborough, isn't so huge but still a sizeable place. Durham could either feature as part of Northumbria or return to a modern day County Palatinate status (Cheshire too - Cestrians aren't, and have never been, part of Lancashire).
Elsewhere, Mercia covering Birmingham and the Midlands; East Anglia covering Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire (and potentially Essex); Wessex covering its traditional area (Bristol area through to the edge of Sussex); Sussex; Kent; and Cornwall. Not perfect by any stretch but I wonder if it would be more successful. People in England do understand these areas and, to admittedly varying degrees, have some loyalty and affection towards them. There will be some who wish to redraw some of my boundaries. There will be some who point out Mercia doesn't have the same pull as Lancashire or Yorkshire and therefore my own theory falls. Perhaps.
It is likely that this would be more palatable in a federal UK. Rather than England being dominant you would have numerous English regions all represented (and all with competing interests). Many would be similarly sized (or bigger) than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland but not behemoths.
It won't happen, of course. The response to Scotland's push for ever greater powers (entirely consistent with the process of devolution, of course) from English cities is understandable. A United Kingdom of a parliament at the Palace of Westminster, an ever more powerful parliament in Holyrood, an ever more powerful assembly in Wales and an assembly in Stormont makes some sense (even if not everyone signs up to it).
All of that with various city regions across England only intensifies the problems that currently exist. Who speaks for Cheshire or Oxfordshire under such a model? What is the point of EVEL (and killing off EVEL wouldn't exactly be the end of the world) under such a system - would shire MPs be able to vote on everything, City MPs on some things, Scottish MPs on fewer things again? It doesn't make very much sense.
Better to really consider devolution across England properly and that must be all England - either as I've described or the less palatable idea of a devolved parliament in England and all the power issues that comes with. And, of course, that will lead to some level of reform at Westminster too.
RCM
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