BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
Page 77
was no return to pre-Thatcher staffing levels and the pressures of expansion continued to change the student experience, universities were in a
better state after ten years of Labour government than in 1997. With a
new-found confidence that belied ministerial doubts about their managerial competence, universities made their own inroads into Dearing’s
£9 billion backlog of capital projects. Few of the growing number of universities were without their prestige building project in 2007, usually
funded by their own borrowing rather than government grant. Student
numbers had continued to grow and UK universities’ international
standing remained high: fledgling international rankings showed the
leading universities second only to their richer American rivals for
research excellence.
Blair’s policies had imposed seemingly irreconcilable strains on the
higher education system, seeking to ensure preferential treatment for
those at the top of the research tree while demanding both expansion and
an intake that was more socially diverse at all types of university. Yet the
sector survived intact, with little evidence of the social engineering that
became a media obsession and occupying a more prominent position in
the life of the nation. The outlook for the post-Blair era may be no more
’
comfortable, particularly as the number of 18-year-olds begins to decline
in England: universities will continue to play second fiddle to schools in
any government’s spending priorities and the cap on top-up fees will
almost certainly remain lower than many would like. But higher education is now recognised as a global market in which the UK is a leading
player.
Inevitably, Blair’s premiership will be remembered in higher education
mainly for top-up fees. Judged by his original aims of creating a market
that would bring significant benefits to Oxbridge and the other leading
universities, they cannot yet be seen as a success. But the reform changed
the character of higher education in England with minimal disruption
and will no doubt pave the way to more substantial change in years to
come.
PA RT I V
Wider relations
22
The national question
Introduction
The more perceptive tributes to Tony Blair on his retirement stressed
how Gladstonian he was. Up to a point. Like W. E. Gladstone, the towering figure of late nineteenth-century politics, Tony Blair was driven
by religious conviction. Like Gladstone, he pursued a liberal interventionist foreign policy. Gladstone demanded that the Turks should be
driven bag and baggage out of Bulgaria. His biggest foreign-policy disaster was the death in Khartoum in 1885 of General Gordon, who had
been pursuing an (actually unauthorised) campaign against an Islamist
insurgent.
Gladstone announced in 1868, when invited to take office for the first
time, ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’, before returning to chop down a
tree at his north Wales estate. Like him, Tony Blair drew his core support
from the peripheral regions of the UK – Scotland, Wales and northern
England. Like Gladstone, Tony Blair carried out his mission to pacify
Ireland. The last month of his premiership saw the utterly improbable
sight of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness laughing out loud as they
prepared to take power together in Northern Ireland (see chapter 23).
Unlike Gladstone, Tony Blair had no particular empathy with northern
Britain, except perhaps in Sedgefield, Co. Durham. As shown in other
chapters of this book, New Labour had to conquer southern England to
govern, and Tony Blair’s true mission was to pacify Isleworth. Other New
Labour figures – Gordon Brown, John Prescott – stood for Labour’s
northern English and Celtic bases.
As many commentators have remarked, the huge constitutional
changes that occurred in Scotland and Wales during Tony Blair’s time
came almost casually. Blair showed some interest in process, but very
little in policy. Devolution was a policy he inherited.
Scotland and Wales in 1994
That New Labour came to power in 1997 committed to devolving power
to Scotland and Wales was the work of three people – Blair’s predecessor
John Smith, and his leaders in Scotland and Wales, Donald Dewar and
Ron Davies. Of these, Smith and Dewar truly believed in devolution in
and for itself. John Smith had been Devolution Minister during the
Callaghan Labour government’s failed attempt to grant devolution to
Scotland and Wales between 1976 and 1979. Donald Dewar’s promotion
had been blocked by the fiercely anti-devolution Willie Ross, Labour’s
Scottish Secretary up to 1976. Ron Davies was a late and reluctant
convert. Dewar and Davies recognised that devolution could bring electoral advantage, but must be handled carefully. In this Dewar was much
more successful than Davies.1
Dangerously called the Callaghan government’s ‘flagship’ policy, devolution was holed below the waterline in February 1977. A group of
Labour backbenchers, led from the north-east of England, killed the original Scotland and Wales Bill by combining with the opposition to defeat a
timetable (guillotine) motion. As the Geordie2 rebels saw it, a Labour
government was proposing to reward the Scots for voting SNP (Scottish
National Party) and punish the Geordies for voting Labour. They had a
point. Labour’s turn to devolution had occurred between the two elections of 1974. Labour politicians in London then suddenly realised that
expected SNP gains could damage both the Union and Labour’s chances
of forming a government. It usually depended on Scotland for its majority. In October 1974, the SNP won 30% of the vote in Scotland, but only
eleven of Scotland’s seventy-two seats. It would only take a few percentage points more in the popular vote, which it was getting in 1975 polls, for
the electoral system to flip from punishing the SNP to rewarding it. On as
little as 35% of the Scottish vote, evenly spread, the SNP would have won
a majority of the seats in Scotland under the Westminster first-past-thepost system. Therefore the Scots had to be bought off.3
11 For John Smith (1938–94) and Donald Dewar (1937–2000), see their respective entries in
the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on-line at www.oxforddnb.com. Ron Davies
stood down from the National Assembly in 2003. He later left the Labour Party. In 2007 he
ran as an independent in his former constituency, coming third.
12 Inhabitant of Tyneside. Perhaps from the name of George Stephenson who was born in
Wylam, near Newcastle.
13 For full details see Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan, State of the Union (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), pp. 160–70.
This was ancient politics. It was what Unionist and Conservative governments had been doing in Ireland, later in Northern Ireland, since
1886, and in Scotland since 1918. In Ireland, it was called ‘killing Home
Rule with kindness’. It failed to kill Home Rule,
and most of Ireland
became independent in 1921. But it continued to work in Scotland and
what was left of Ireland. As a result, in 1977 public spending per head in
Scotland was higher than in the northern region of England, although
Scotland was richer and (the Geordies maintained) the north of England
had problems of social deprivation just as severe as Scotland’s. Nothing
has changed – see table 22.4 below.
The damaged Callaghan flagship ploughed on, but sank in sight of
port, taking its whole company with it. The Bill was split into separate
Bills for Scotland and Wales. Further Labour backbench rebellions
imposed two more hurdles. First, devolution was not to be ratified unless
confirmed by a referendum in the relevant territory. Second, in those referenda, devolution was not to be ratified unless 40% of the electorate
voted for it. This was splendid hypocrisy, as far fewer than 40% of the
electorate had voted for the then (or any other post-war) government. It
worked for the rebels. Welsh devolution crashed to an 80/20 defeat.
Scottish devolution was narrowly carried in the referendum, but the Yes
vote fell far, far short of the 40% threshold. In March 1979, the fading
SNP had to challenge the government in a confidence motion. This was
when the now hackneyed phrase ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’ first
appeared in UK political speech. The government lost the confidence
motion by one vote, forcing the 1979 general election. Margaret
Thatcher’s victory in that election killed devolution stone dead.
Or so it seemed. The entire Scottish political class had been preparing
for devolution for five years. When the incoming government abruptly
dismissed it, nothing happened. This signalled that the demand for
devolution had been broad but not deep. Probably, it was mostly a
demand for more – more of whatever was going. It was rational for
the Scots to demand that, and rational for the UK government to
concede it.
However, at the ensuing Conservative general election victories in 1983
and 1987, the party’s relative position in Scotland weakened. After a revolt
by people in big houses facing sharp rate increases, the Conservatives had
piloted the community charge (‘poll tax’) in Scotland ahead of England.
In 1987, all the Scottish ministers involved in introducing the poll tax
there lost their seats. This was probably coincidence – the poll tax disaster
had barely begun to register with the electorate at the time. But by
1989, with this and other causes of resentment against Margaret Thatcher
bubbling up, the fact that unpopular policies were being imposed by a
government that held only ten of the seventy-two seats started to register.
The SNP, with three MPs, denounced Scottish Labour MPs as the ‘Feeble
Fifty’. A collection of Scots worthies formed a Scottish Constitutional
Convention, supported by Donald Dewar and the Labour and Liberal
Democrat parties, but not the Conservatives or the SNP. The
Constitutional Convention reported in 1995. It recommended a 129-seat
Scottish Parliament, comprising one first-past-the-post MSP from each
Westminster constituency and regional lists crafted so that the overall
party balance was proportionate to the regional votes cast. This is the
Additional Member System (AMS), as also practised in Germany and New
Zealand, which was to flummox many commentators in 2007. The parliament was to have the power to vary the standard rate of income tax up or
down by 3p in the pound. But the basic block of money for public spending on devolved services would continue to be an un-earmarked grant
from the Treasury to Scotland, calculated under the existing Barnett
formula (explained below). The Convention therefore proposed that the
Scots should – at least mostly – spend tax revenues that other people
raised.4
Wales was different. It always is. The 1979 referendum had shown up a
cruel gulf between Welsh-speaking and English-speaking Wales. People
in the first wanted to protect their language and culture, and supported
devolution. People in the second – about 80% of Wales – saw the language
more as a threat than as an opportunity. Quietly constructive language
policies, and a lot of killing with kindness in the shape of the huge subsidies from mostly English taxpayers to S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru, the
Welsh-language public TV station), had defused the politics of language
by the mid-1990s. However, the hegemonic Labour Party in Wales
included many politicians who saw devolution as a distraction. This may
have been for low reasons of wanting to keep their seats, and/or for the
high reasons articulated by Labour’s most charismatic Welshman
Aneurin (Nye) Bevan (1897–1960). In Bevan’s view, socialism was about
redistribution from the rich, wherever they lived, to the poor, wherever
they lived. The task of a socialist movement was to seize the levers of
power and ensure that the redistribution took place. In this perspective,
14 For the Constitutional Convention, see ibid., pp. 172–3. For the poll tax in Scotland, see
D. Butler, A. Adonis and T. Travers, Failure in British Government: The Politics of the Poll
Tax (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 129–36.
devolution to poor regions of the UK was at best pointless and at worst
counter-productive.
So when John Smith died suddenly in 1994, there existed a blueprint
for devolution in Scotland, which he had publicly backed. There was
nothing in Wales. Between then and Labour’s victory in 1997 the plans
had to be worked up. There is no evidence that Tony Blair took an active
part before the 1997 election campaign. He left it to Dewar and Davies,
with the English implications to be left for later. Donald Dewar’s task
was easy, as he had a blueprint to hand. He had himself been one of the
initiators of the Constitutional Convention. The arrangements in the
Scotland Act 1998 are exactly as proposed by the Constitutional
Convention – both in what they enact (especially electoral reform and
the division of responsibility between Edinburgh and London) and in
what they overlook (finance, and representation of Scotland at
Westminster). Some people, less far-sighted than Dewar, complained
that the AMS electoral system would deprive Labour of a majority in the
Scottish Parliament. Dewar himself described it as ‘the best example of
charitable giving this century in politics’.5 However, its true purpose was
to deprive the SNP of a majority in the Scottish Parliament. Dewar had
absorbed the lesson of the near-miss of 1974 and 1975. In the Scottish
Parliament, the SNP cannot win a majority of seats unless it gets almost
50% of the vote. Therefore, Scottish independence has many thresholds
to cross.
Ron Davies had the heirs of Nye Bevan to fight. They included Neil
Kinnock, the Welsh leader of the Labour Party before Smith, still very
influential in Wales. With no constitutional convention to guide him,
Davies settled fo
r the most that the factions in the Welsh Labour Party
could agree on. This was an assembly that would have the powers to
make secondary but not primary legislation in devolved areas. Secondary
legislation means statutory instruments issued under Acts of Parliament.
If the National Assembly wanted something that required an Act of
Parliament, it must ask the UK government and House of Commons
for it.
In 1996–7 Tony Blair made his only direct interventions into Scottish
and Welsh devolution. In 1996, he and George Robertson (the shadow
Secretary of State for Scotland: Dewar had temporarily moved to social
security) insisted that there would be not one but two referendum questions on the Constitutional Convention proposals. The first would ask
15 Parliamentary Debates, vol. CCCXII, 6 May 1998, col. 803.
whether voters wanted a Scottish Parliament; the second whether they
agreed with the 3p-in-the-pound tax power. In the 1997 election campaign, Blair went further. Visiting Edinburgh a month before polling day,
he told the political correspondent of The Scotsman:
‘[S]overeignty rests with me as an English MP and that’s the way it will
stay’. Mr Blair also ruled out the use of a Scottish Parliament’s tax-varying
powers, which he likened to those of an English parish council, in the
first term of a Labour government . . . [H]is five-year pledge of no rise
in the basic and standard rates of tax applied to ‘Scotland as well as
England’.6
Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, accused Blair of burying the Claim of
Right (the summary of the Constitutional Convention). What indeed
was the point of offering a 3p-in-the-pound tax and then promising not
to use it?
However self-contradictory, Blair’s actions held off a Conservative
threat to make the ‘tartan tax’ an effective slogan. In the 1997 general election, the Conservatives were wiped out in both Wales and Scotland. The
first-past-the-post electoral system had its usual exaggerative effects.
Table 22.1 shows the votes and seats won by the parties in Scotland and
Wales at each election between 1997 and 2007.
The referenda took place in September 1997. Both the parliament and
its tax powers were comfortably ratified in Scotland. In Wales it was a