Good news everybody: Gordon Brown is back. If you were worried that it had been all quiet on the double-down-on-New-Labour front, fear no longer.
The basis for his latest sally is new polling from his organisation which purports to show that it is alienation from Westminster that is driving a wedge between the Scots and the English – and thus that the answer to the woes of the Union is, you guessed it, hollowing out central government even further.
Yet there’s a slight of hand here. Whilst Brown dresses up his point as “the problem Scots have is with London and the over concentration of power in Whitehall + Westminster”, his article in the Scotsman is a little more revealing:
“A new survey of Scottish attitudes to England and Wales reveals the extent to which Scots feel close bonds with England’s north east, the north west, the people of the Midlands and with Wales – and how they feel they share the same progressive values and an equal desire for change.”
Wow, what good news – that’s quite a broad coalition! But I wonder if there’s anything else that could unite this regional coalition beyond “progressive values”. After all, I’m sure I’ve seen the areas he leaves out (the South, basically) grouped together somewhere else…
Oh. Oh I see. (Who knows why the South West gets left out; perhaps its balance of payments deficit with the Treasury isn’t big enough to foster those “progressive values”.)
If there were any doubt that the correlation between this map and the coalition Brown is trying to build is deliberate, his policy programme puts paid to it. As Zachary Spiro previously noted, his proposals involve giving policy outcomes (and their attendant spending commitments) entrenched constitutional status:
“We are left once more with the spectre of courts trying to work out whether benefit levels, pensions or other cash transfers are enough to avoid poverty. Most damagingly, this could lead to judges setting the level of welfare payments over the heads of ministers, the public spending consequences not figuring at all.”
It is at least a faithful and flawlessly-executed build on the traditional New Labour constitutional style: clothed in noble language but revealing a short-sighted, cynical, and entirely mercenary understanding of the United Kingdom and the case for it.
And it fulfils Brown’s personal imperative that the explanation for why devolution has failed to fulfil the promises made in 1997 must lie in those bits of the constitution he didn’t change; the only flaw he can admit is, perhaps, not realising just how right his original analysis really was!
Little wonder that Mark Drakeford, the First Minister of Wales, has been content to row in behind this vision of a “solidary union”. The Guardian reports him arguing that:
“We have to rebuild the safety net, so you know that your membership of the United Kingdom entitles you to that collective security that it represents.”
But the argument that the Union should be a mechanism by which “every citizen’s rights to public services and financial security are protected” cuts both ways.
Should the devolved administrations, as recipients of British taxpayers’ money, not be accountable to the British taxpayer – through the British institutions which represent them collectively – for how that money is spent?
And if the United Kingdom is to act as guarantor of citizens’ rights and services, ought that not to involve the British state being willing and able to step in when either of those are threatened, whether by intent or incompetence, by the devolved authorities?
To pick just one recent example, would a true “solidarity union” allow island communities to suffer because of the SNP’s gross mishandling of ferry services?
Given that Welsh Labour once responded to Michael Gove merely penning a newspaper article comparing English and Welsh school outcomes by spluttering about “colonial attitudes”, one suspects this is not what Drakeford has in mind.
Neither Brown who does not seem to have raised his voice during the row over Section 35, a clear example of Westminster intervening to protect UK-wide rights from devolved encroachment, nor now seem enthusiastic, amidst this proposed entrenchment spree, of following international norms and entrenching the actual existence of the UK.
Yet as I have pointed out more than once, fiscal transfers can’t be dressed up as reciprocal solidarity if today’s recipients reserve the right to opt out in the event that they become tomorrow’s contributors.
Yet just as devolution is either a process or a settlement, depending on the needs of the moment, solidary thus conceived is a one-way street. It is the devocrat conception of that unfortunate 2014 slogan, “the best of both worlds”: maximal cash, minimal obligations.
Even after a quarter-century, Brown still cleaves to the original New Labour dream so sadly derailed by their Polish-Soviet War, the crushing rout in the referendum for a North Eastern assembly: a coalition of Labour fiefdoms, their claims to British cash constitutionally insulated from the voters and regions that generate it. As Waugh might have put it:
“The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in alms.”
Odds and Ends
- A fun profile in the Times of Alister Jack, “the toff who is running rings around the SNP and Greens”;
- Will look at this story more next week but the FT has the latest on the constitutional row over the Scottish Government’s bottle recycling scheme;
- And the Daily Telegraph reports that Humza Yousaf plans to introduce a tourist tax;
- An SNP candidate fought an election whilst suspended for “bullying and inappropriate behaviour”;
- Finally, the FT has interviewed some of the people who originally complained to the police about the SNP’s missing funds.