Gordon Brown has broken his silence again. The former prime minister told the Edinburgh International Book Festival that the Scottish Parliament had ‘failed to deliver a fairer and more prosperous Scotland’ and had instead become a ‘battering ram for constitutional warfare’. What’s that, Lassie? Timmy’s trapped down the well? And creating a Scottish parliament to run almost all of Scotland’s affairs separately from the rest of the UK helped rather than hurt the campaign for independence? Jeepers.
The battering ram that Brown laments exists only because the party and government in which he played a somewhat senior role insisted on fashioning it.
At the time of the Scottish devolution referendum in 1997, they were warned that setting up a rival parliament to Westminster would begin the unravelling of the Union. Scottish Labour did what it always did: pummelled the dissenters and pressed on regardless. After all, as George Robertson famously declared, devolution was going to ‘kill nationalism stone dead’. In the event, after just two terms of Labour-led governance, the SNP eked their way into power, where they remain after 12 years of marching through almost every institution in sight. The party they replaced has become irrelevant and faces oblivion.
Labour is now beginning to see that devolution was a trap, one of its own devising. It’s only taken them 20 years. They’re like someone who only figures out the killer in Midsomer Murders halfway through News at Ten.
There is more joy in Heaven over one devolutionist who repenteth but Brown doesn’t sound at all penitent. In fact, he’s champing at the bit to replicate the devolution success story south of the border through federalism. Federalism is the Michael Myers of constitutional politics: no matter how many times you think you’ve killed it, it always comes back.
Brown says we must ‘find new ways for Scotland and England to live side by side’, as though he played no part in trashing the way that had served us well enough for more than three centuries.
Federalism may excite Brown and others so-minded. It certainly excites academics, those curators of ideas too perfect to be spoiled by exposure to the public. There is, however, no popular appetite for it. And besides, if a devolution settlement that exists by the will of Parliament can cause this much political disruption, what is the likely impact of enshrining such a set-up in a new codified constitution?
Labour’s answer to its hatchet job on the Union is to give it a few more swings then try to piece all the parts back together again. It will not hold; the damage is done.
Labour was warned but would not listen and handed the SNP not only a battering ram for independence but a club with which to beat Labour to pulp. The SNP may be hapless in power but the reason they are in power at all is down to Labour’s arrogant designs. Before he next breaks his silence to share with us his constitutional ruminations, Brown might reflect that he and his party have done enough already.
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