BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
Page 80
Has devolution worked?
In Sir Humphrey Appleby’s favourite phrase Yes … and No. It has
worked in two main ways: containing the nationalist threat to the Union
and offering a natural experiment in domestic policy. It has failed in
three main ways: finance, representation and the possibility of English
backlash.
Containing the nationalist threat
This may seem a surprising claim immediately after the SNP installed its
first First Minister, Alex Salmond, in May 2007. However, as already
noted, he will not get a referendum on independence unless a majority of
the Scottish Parliament will vote for one. And if he does get it, it will only
succeed if his party can buck a thirty-year trend that support for independence runs behind support for the SNP.
It is much too early to make predictions for the 2007–11 Scottish
Parliament. But in the election campaign two themes were prominent.
One is good for the SNP’s prospects and the other is bad for them.
Salmond’s good move might have been copied from Leon Trotsky or
Derek Hatton, the Trotskyite who led Liverpool City Council until Neil
Kinnock expelled him and his friends from the Labour Party in 1985.
Trotsky wanted to foment ‘permanent revolution’ by making popular but
impossible demands of any bourgeois government. The Alex Salmond
version of that was the SNP’s call during the 2007 to close down the
nuclear submarine base at Faslane, in a deep narrow sea loch near
Glasgow. Under devolution, that is no business of the Scottish Parliament
or Executive. Defence is a reserved matter, for the UK government alone.
There is no realistic chance that (under a government of any party) it
would agree to move its nuclear-armed submarines out of a site that is
operationally ideal to one outside Scotland that would be much less suitable for hiding submarines.
But as a Trostskyite move, it was very smart. Faslane has been a site of
left-wing protest for forty years.20 Voting against Faslane was a feel-good,
cheap-talk way of voting against Tony Blair and the Iraq War. As no UK
government will concede the SNP demand, it can go on demanding it and
inducing the good feeling.
On the other hand, the SNP’s domestic manifesto was radically incoherent. It promised to spend yet more on public services with no suggestion of reforming them. Its expenditure would be funded out of oil
revenues, which the SNP cheerfully assumed would continue to flow and
would all flow to Scotland. Neither assumption seems plausible. The
same oil revenues were double-booked to fund a capital programme for
when the oil ran out. The party promised to abolish council tax in
Scotland and use the 3p-in-the-pound income tax to replace it, ignoring
the fact that if it abolished council tax, it would lose the council tax
benefit which the UK Treasury pays to those who cannot afford the tax
(or some of them). It will therefore predictably struggle to honour its
manifesto promises during the 2007–11 parliament.
Devolution as a natural experiment
This is linked to the second, unforeseen, advantage of devolution to
Scotland and Wales. Policy on health, education and local government
has now diverged considerably across the four countries of the UK. As
noted, this is more because the Scots and Welsh administrations have not
changed what the English administration – i.e. the UK government
acting as government of England – has changed. The second and third
Blair administrations have seen a spread of control mechanisms designed
to push up the performance of public services. These have included
20 I grew up with this, to the tune of ‘Three craws were sitting on a wa’ On a cold and frosty
morning’:
It’s suicide to hae them on the Clyde,
Hae them on the Clyde,hae them on the Clyde,
Sheer suicide to hae them on the Clyde
And we dinnae want Polaris!
Off, off, get off the Holy Loch,
Off the Holy Loch, off the Holy Loch,
Off, off, get off the Holy Loch,
For we dinnae want Polaris!
The base which in the 1960s was in the Holy Loch off the Clyde estuary is now at the
more remote Faslane, on the Gare Loch.
league tables and internal markets. They have been highly controversial,
and on the whole unpopular with existing providers of public services (as
one would expect). There are doubts about the reliability and validity of
some of the performance measures.21 But the comparison with Scotland
and Wales puts Blairite reform in England in a good light. Public services
in England do more with less than in either Scotland or Wales. They cost
less and deliver more. The conspicuous failures of the NHS in Wales since
devolution have already claimed political scalps. Future administrations
in both countries may have to make Blairite reforms – or find some other
way to reform their public services.
One might expect some pressure in the opposite direction – when the
devolved administrations do something good, one should expect the
English to copy them. This has not happened much, for somewhat disreputable reasons. The eminent Scots historian Christopher Harvie
(elected an SNP MSP in 2007) records a conversation between the leading
public intellectuals of Scotland and England, John Stuart Blackie and
Benjamin Jowett, in 1866: ‘I hope you in Oxford don’t think we hate you.’
‘We don’t think about you’, was the reply.22
In the early years of devolution, some advisers to both Tony Blair and
Gordon Brown became agitated about the Scottish Executive’s expensive
and probably unsustainable commitments to social care and cheap university fees. Others were more blasé. The policies (and demands for
them) were not leaking south for two reasons. The Anglo-Scots border is
thinly populated, so few elderly ladies have moved to Scotland in search
of social care (and if they did it would be the Scots’ problem). And the
English media are more blissfully ignorant than ever before of anything
happening in Scottish or Welsh politics. When the leakage was the other
way (for instance, in reports during 2006 of patients from Powys being
turned away by hospitals in Shropshire) the news was big in Wales but
imperceptible in England.
Finance, representation, and the English backlash
The Barnett formula is unsustainable and the West Lothian Question is
unanswerable. Some have argued that this does not matter as long as the
21 For an introduction to this large subject, see the website of the ESRC Public Services
Programme at www.publicservices.ac.uk/our_research.asp#1stSmall, on which see especially the Jacobs, O’Mahony and McLean projects.
22 Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics, 1707–1977
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1977), p. 121.
people do not care about it. It is true that the Scots and Welsh do not care
much that they are over-represented. The Scots do
not care that they are
over-funded for their public services. Who would? The Welsh ought to
care more than they do that Barnett actually under-funds them, relative
to need, but up to 2007 they have been (for such a musical nation)
uncharacteristically quiet about it.
But those who say ‘the people don’t care, only academic fusspots do’
have been looking in the wrong place. The place they should be looking is
England. True, the ‘English backlash’ was expected to lead to a vote for an
assembly in the north-east in 2004 and did not. But the area of greatest
danger to the Scots is not the north-east but the south-east of England.
Lobbyists in London and the south-east are increasingly saying ‘We pay
the taxes and don’t get the services. Our tax receipts are going to those
subsidy junkies in Scotland and Northern Ireland.’ The numbers in
table 22.4 give this claim some credence (although note that public
expenditure per head in London is very high). All parties in Scotland
other than the Labour Party were demanding ‘more fiscal autonomy’ in
the approach to the 2007 elections. They meant very different things by
that phrase. But they face the risk of getting what they wish for. A cool
London government might say, ‘All right – you asked for fiscal autonomy.
Here is some. You can keep your tax proceeds – even, if you insist, the
proceeds of 90% of North Sea oil taxation. In return, you can choose
what public services you want out of that tax revenue. Off you go, and the
best of luck.’ Scotland might then become not another Quebec, but
another Slovakia – surprised into independence by a larger neighbour
calling its bluff.23
Was it anything to do with Tony Blair?
In stark contrast to Northern Ireland, Tony Blair had relatively little to do
with Scottish and Welsh devolution. He inherited the commitment from
John Smith. He oversaw large constitutional changes but had little input
to them. As he himself said to a reporter, it took him three years to realise
that having devolved power to Scotland and Wales he should not meddle
in their affairs. The good bits of the constitutional change were the bits
23 Iain McLean, ‘Scotland: Towards Quebec or Slovakia?’, Regional Studies, 35, 2001: 637–44;
Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Independence for Scotland Would Not Be Good For England’,
The Guardian, 3 May 2007. Available at www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/
0,,2071089,00.html.
that the Scottish Constitutional Convention had thought through. The
bad bits were the bits they had ignored. The failings of the Government of
Wales Act 1998 were corrected by the 2006 Act. The failings of representation and finance are with us yet.
However, in retirement Tony Blair may have the last laugh. Devolution
has offered a natural experiment in public service delivery. It has tended
to show that the unpopular reforms of the second Blair term to public
services in England have worked – at least when compared to the unreformed public services of Scotland and Wales. The Scots and the Welsh
deserve more fiscal autonomy. When and if they get it, they will face the
real world of politics on a tight budget. Once that has happened, devolution will have come of age.
23
Ireland: the Peace Process
Tony Blair’s Irish peace
When he entered Downing Street on 2 May 1997, Tony Blair would not
have believed the extent to which two conflicts – one ancient, one modern
– would shape his premiership and inform his legacy. Nor that it would be
a deal with the octogenarian Reverend Ian Paisley – sealed in his last days
in No. 10 – that would enable the Prime Minister to set seemingly stable
peace in Northern Ireland against the violent uncertainty to which he
would have to leave Iraq.
It might not have been quite what the author of the famous email had
in mind months before, advising on the orchestration of Blair’s farewell
tour, urging him to depart the stage leaving the crowds cheering for more.
Cheering crowds would have been too much to expect in Belfast, where
the antagonisms and scars of bitter division and brutal conflict would not
be quickly excised. Indeed some on both sides had watched in disbelief as
their tribal chieftains inched toward accommodation, convinced,
hoping, praying . . . that their leaders might still be engaged in an ever
more elaborate version of the all-too-familiar ‘blame game’.
Yet it was truly a remarkable moment at Stormont on 8 May 2007 when
Blair, accompanied by Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, watched Paisley
and Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness assume their joint office as First
and Deputy First Ministers in Northern Ireland’s new power-sharing
Executive. And it would certainly be one for Blair to savour in the postDowning Street years.
A helping hand
But Blair could hardly have failed in Northern Ireland, could he? For had
nationalist Ireland not already done much of the ‘heavy lifting’ by the
time he arrived in power? Specifically, had the IRA not ensured politics
would eventually triumph after concluding that republicans could not
hope to force British withdrawal and Irish unification by means of ‘the
long war’?
The Conservatives would insist any assessment of the Blair government’s conduct of the British economy should begin with its ‘inheritance’. In Northern Ireland, too, the new Prime Minister owed much to
those who had gone before. It would be right in any circumstances to
acknowledge the cast of characters which contributed to the promising
prospect that greeted Blair on his first visit to the Province within weeks
of taking office. It is also necessary to chart the evolution of the Peace
Process to appreciate and contextualise the extraordinary developments
that would occur on Blair’s watch, and his contribution to them.
The Provisional IRA’s original ceasefire of 31 August 1994 might have
exploded with the bomb that killed two British civilians at Canary Wharf
on 9 February 1996. However the consensus remained – not least within
the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) – that the bombing as much as anything reflected republican impatience with an exhausted Major government, perceived by then to be dependent on Ulster Unionist votes in the
House of Commons. Unionists inevitably saw the bomb in the City of
London as proof that the IRA’s ‘cessation’ of operations was tactical and
predicated on a guaranteed – united Ireland – outcome. Those British
civil servants with access to the hard intelligence instead saw a republican
leadership effectively marking time pending the commencement of fresh
negotiations with an incoming Labour administration. When those negotiations finally got under way, moreover, the parties would discover that
the essential framework of a political settlement – including dual referendums as the means of ‘self-determination’ by the peoples of Ireland – had
been defined by visionary SDLP leader John Hume as far back as 1990.1
Soon a
fter Margaret Thatcher and then Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald
signed the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, Hume had engaged in a personally and politically perilous attempt to persuade Sinn Fein president
Gerry Adams that IRA violence was not only immoral but counterproductive. Hume’s thesis was that the Thatcher/Fitzgerald deal established for the first time British ‘neutrality’ on the question of the Union of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He was mistaken. Edward Heath’s
government had signalled it would have no desire to impede the realisation of Irish unity, should a majority seek it.2 And the belief that Britain
1 John Hume interview, Irish Times, 13 January 1989.
2 British Green Paper, 1972, IFB no. 117004987.
:
was ‘neutral’ on the constitutional issue certainly informed unionist fears
through the long years of the ensuing ‘Troubles’. Perhaps it did not
matter in the great scheme of unfolding events because republicans had
not believed it until this point. Sceptics would counter that such matters
of fact were too lightly discarded as the republicans searched for a new
narrative with which, ultimately, to justify the end of their terrorist campaign. In any event, Hume’s argument appeared to be given added validity in November 1990 when Margaret Thatcher’s then Secretary of State
Peter Brooke found utility in declaring that Britain had ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest’ in remaining in Northern Ireland. In fairness,
Brooke’s words were also apparently intended to signal an emotional allegiance to the Union that only a majority for Irish unity could displace.
However, and inevitably perhaps, the focus remained on the argument
that it was primarily republican violence that gave the British reason to
stay – and that London would present no obstacle if only nationalists and
republicans could persuade unionists that their future lay outside the
United Kingdom in some form of ‘New’ and ‘Agreed’ Ireland.
It later emerged that from at least 1982 Adams had also been engaged
in secret diplomacy with Redemptorist priest Father Alec Reid, a largely
unsung inspiration of what was known in the first instance as the ‘Irish’
peace process. Adams had also opened indirect contact the previous year
with Charles Haughey, as the then Taoiseach sought to negotiate a resolution of the 1981 IRA hunger strikes with Prime Minister Thatcher. In