On Thursday, I looked at the fallout from Rishi Sunak and Alister Jack’s decision to block the passage of Nicola Sturgeon’s controversial Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill using Section 35 (s35) of the Scotland Act 1998.
Contrary to the orthodox common sense of much devolution commentary, there is as yet no sign of a backlash from Scottish voters outraged by a supposed attack on the prerogatives of the Scottish Parliament, no more than there was after the passage of the UK Internal Market Act.
Far from being energised by a constitutional row, the First Minister has been thrown decisively onto the back foot on the substance of the dispute. Her interview with ITV yesterday, on the subject of whether transwomen should be placed in women’s prisons, makes excruciating viewing; her decision to intervene in the most recent case makes it very difficult for her to plead the operational independence of the Scottish Prison Service in others.
That such a furore would erupt so hot on the heel’s of Jack’s decision to use s35 was not within the Government’s gift, of course. But Downing Street’s assessment of the battlefield – that Holyrood was out of step with the balance of Scottish opinion, and that this created propitious conditions for intervention by Westminster – seems to have been sound.
It has thus won an important engagement with the SNP, not just on the narrow question of policy around trans people, but also by breaking the seal on s35 and confounding once again the school of political wisdom which maintains that giving battle to the Nationalists does more harm than good.
Yet important as such issues are – and they are existential, at least for any British government which wishes to remain a British government – there are also wider lessons here. Because this is a clear and unusual instance of the Government choosing decisive action over delay, and reaping the rewards of so doing.
It isn’t difficult to imagine the alternative timeline where Jack stays his hand, after all; there would have been plenty of wise heads commending him on a disaster averted. And it would have been much more in line with the Government’s wider approach to difficult issues.
After waiting nine years for an overall majority, the Party has proven remarkably reluctant to wield it decisively to drive through major reform. Michael Gove abandoned full-flat planning reform in order to deliver a de minimis version that was then abandoned in turn; talk about reforming the Supreme Court came to nothing; even the shambling zombie that is the British Bill of Rights Bill would actually do very little.
Yet with the smouldering, irradiated exception of Liz Truss’s mini-budget, the Conservatives doesn’t have a terrible record in the few cases where it has defied the not-a-good-look tendency and acted decisively. Pushing through the UK Internal Market Act, mentioned above, is perhaps the most prominent example; indefinitely extending the so-called grace periods in the Northern Ireland Protocol, originally negotiated by Gove as time-limited, is another.
That all the examples which spring immediately to mind lie in the realm of the constitution may simply reflect the preoccupations of the author, or fact that such questions do not divide the parliamentary party in the manner that housing does.
But it nonetheless suggests that ministers should be more confident they are at pursuing root-and-branch approaches to other policy challenges.
This wouldn’t be a silver bullet. Problems such as small boats, for example, are driven by many factors, many outside the Government’s effective control. But there is little excuse for ministers railing about activist groups gumming up the Rwanda policy in the courts when they could, in theory, do something about the legal framework which underpins such strategies.
Likewise, Tory MPs complain a lot about various consequences of the Equality Act 2010, such as the suffusion of diversity officers in companies and public bodies, and so on. But that legislation has been on the statute book for almost 13 years, and the Conservatives have had a handsome overall majority for three of those. They could have amended it, but did not.
Not every battle that Conservatives want to fight is currently winnable, and not every battle fought by a bolder Conservative Government over the past several years would have been won.
But some of them would have been, and that would have added up to a more substantial and likely more enduring legacy than putting off the difficult decisions time and again. If not in this Parliament, with this majority, when?
Perhaps Sunak feels he has a better excuse than his predecessors for the cautious approach: even if his party wasn’t deeply divided, we are well into the tail end of this parliament and the legislative timetable is already packed. There is scarcely room for bold new bills, or time to pass them and have them take effect in time for an election.
But even if there are limited opportunities to act under existing legislation, as on s35, the time to be identifying and drawing up such policies is still now. At the very least, it would give the Tories a more compelling programme to offer sceptical voters at the next election than more solemn promises to do something, after years of not having done very much.