Only Gordon Brown could come up with a 40-point plan for constitutional renewal. ‘Less is more’ is not a principle with which the former Prime Minister is familiar. When his UK constitutional commission was launched in 2020 we were promised a ‘radical alternative to nationalism’ and a ‘constitutional revolution’ to remake Britain along federal lines. What has emerged looks like fiddly, modish reforms with lots of hubs and clusters and the inevitable citizen’s juries. Plus, of course, more devolution to Scotland and a reformed upper house that Conservatives will no doubt portray as a new battering ram for the SNP.
Has Brown’s review landed well? Sir Keir Starmer has certainly endorsed his proposed abolition of the House of the Lords. Brown’s scheme involves replacing the Lords with an elected ‘Assembly of the Nations and Regions’ of around 200 members. It looks very much like an exercise in strengthening the Scottish parliament’s powers vis-à-vis Westminster.
A fortnight ago, the Supreme Court rejected Nicola Sturgeon’s plan for an ‘advisory’ referendum on independence. The reason it could do this is that five years ago the Supreme Court ruled that Westminster has the right to overrule Holyrood – even on devolved matters – because it exercises overall sovereignty under the 1998 Scotland Act. But this could change if Brown’s recommendations are taken on. The former Labour prime minister’s new Assembly of Nations and Regions would entrench the sovereignty of Holyrood in the heart of the UK parliament. This would happen in a manner ‘analogous to a written constitution’, as Brown describes. One small point, though: the UK does not have a written constitution.
Brown hopes to entrench the constitutional status of Holyrood by making the Sewel Convention ‘legally binding’ on the UK parliament. This means that Westminster could no longer override acts of the Scottish parliament in devolved areas, as it did when it rejected Holyrood’s EU Continuity Act in 2018. That particular legislation would have rolled over EU environmental, social and health regulations – effectively overturning Brexit in Scotland.
Scotland is equally suspicious of constitutional ‘revolutions’ that go nowhere, with many believing that Brown’s promises of federalism in the past have come to nought.
The Assembly of Nations and Regions would also install a raft of nationalist assembly persons in the upper house, which the SNP currently boycotts. English voters loathe the idea of Scots meddling in Westminster, which is why the Tories will no doubt seek to spin the Brown plan as providing a new platform for separatism.
English voters are rightly suspicious of constitutional change. They have never supported federalism or even regional devolution. Labour abandoned it in 2004 after regional assemblies were decisively rejected by a referendum in the north east of England. It is not clear whether the English regions would be given another say though one suspects not. That would only fuel SNP demands for a repeat referendum.
And Scotland is equally suspicious of constitutional ‘revolutions’ that go nowhere, with many believing that Brown’s promises of federalism in the past have come to nought. The SNP has dismissed the plan as the ‘same old same old’, rejecting Brown’s new tax and borrowing powers as worthless. Admittedly, they are extremely vague.
There is mention of ‘consultation’ on raising the ceiling on Scotland’s existing borrowing powers to over £500 million a year. Nicola Sturgeon has demanded that the borrowing cap is removed altogether, something the Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is unlikely to accept just when Labour is trying to sound economically responsible.
Holyrood actually already has powers to raise funds. How? By issuing bonds – which it has never used. Nor, as the report points out, has it used powers to set new national taxes, preferring to blame Westminster for everything from the crisis in the NHS to Scotland’s drug death scandal. The perennial complaint from the SNP is that Scotland is starved of resources by parsimonious and neoliberal UK governments ‘for which Scotland never voted’. Yet the reality is that the Scottish government is better funded than the rest of the UK. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Scotland enjoys 30 per cent more spending per head than England.
And there is one great woolly mammoth in the room left unaddressed by the Brown Report. The 1978 Barnett Formula – a mechanism used by the Treasury to automatically adjust the amounts of public expenditure allocated to the devolved nations and which underpins Scotland’s funding advantage – was supposed to have been phased out years ago. Yet it persists in the background even as the Scottish parliament has acquired extensive income tax raising powers of its own. Until this anomaly is ended and Scotland is required, in time, to live more within its means, the SNP has a fiscal win-win. It can offer things like free prescriptions and free university tuition while simultaneously claiming that it is being impoverished by Westminster.
You don’t have to be a Tory MP to regard this dependency as unhealthy. There is little incentive to inject dynamism into the depressed Scottish economy or reform public services because it is always easier to blame Westminster cuts. And even the Scottish National Party has itself recognised this. It has a longstanding commitment to what is called ‘full fiscal autonomy’: only spending what is raised in Scotland by taxes. It is surely time to let the country have it.
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